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I’m eagerly anticipating seeing Larson in Avengers: Endgame, but this film really felt like enduring a preview before the flick; forgettably enjoyable, a means to pass the time before the centerpiece.
Disney’s brand-new superhero film comes on the heels of various other films that have actually resisted stereotypes with females and African-Americans in starring roles. Captain Marvel halfheartedly attempts to break Marvel’s tired formula, yet finishes up meandering in needlessly jumbled story that fails to inform us who Carol Danvers really is. Or perhaps even worse, why we should care about her.
Hollywood had mostly left ladies out of the superhero films, in part due to very early bombs such as 2004’s “Catwoman” and 2005’s “Elektra.” Introducing Captain Marvel was a risk. Perhaps less so after the successes of Wonder Woman and Black Panther but still one that the MCU needed to acknowledge.
Apart From Iron Man and perhaps Captain America, has Marvel ever before launched a fantastic origin story? Introducing the heroes of the MCU constantly feels like such a job, a formulaic process that is tired and overdone. In this, I think Spiderman: Homecoming was an excellent transition where the characters backstory was not really covered. Of course, considering that Spiderman had been introduced so many times before and had an established fanbase, I can understand the reason’s why an intro for Captain Marvel was necessary.
When Captain Marvel first appeared in Wonder Super-Heroes # 12 in December of 1967, the character was a blonde dude called Mar-Vell whose name human beings mispronounced (turning the 2 words right into one, “Marvel”). In 1968 he befriends a lady called Carol Danvers, an U.S. Air Force pilot at a top secret army research base. During a surge of a Kree device, Danvers is saved by Captain Marvel, whose DNA merges with hers, transforming her into a half-Kree lady with extraordinary powers. In the ’70s she reappears as Ms. Wonder, a character, that lastly had her very own leading series in 1977. Her introduction in comicdom is pretty bad, by today’s standards, established as a love interest of Mar-Vell’s.
So, simply put, the Captain Marvel we have actually seen in trailers and posters and teasers played by Brie Larson is a fairly brand-new concept.
The Story or Lack Thereof
The story truly deals with an absence of a daunting villain; the final face-off occurs after Danvers realizes her complete potential, and she is never really at risk. While she has three different primary relationships, the only one that seems to gel at all, is that with Nick Fury.
Nick Fury is the only companion that really feels like a solid partnership, the chemistry between the 2 characters triggering the second they meet. Rambeau isn’t fleshed out in the tiniest. While the play on amnesia as a gap is somewhat useful, it doesn’t seem to really apply as her mannerisms throughout the movie show her familiarity with all things on Earth. There is a brief allusion to a universal translator, but she seems to know how to use everything from motorcycles to telephones without any hardship at all. An alien being would have to have at least some confusion wouldn’t they?
We do not invest time with Yon-Rogg, as well as his link to Danvers feels far-off; it’s difficult to care when their relationship sours, as it was never actually established to begin with. He repeatedly tells Danvers that she is “also emotional,” yet oddly, we never see any proof of this whatsoever.
While Danvers is developed as an exceedingly effective warrior, she doesn’t encounter a real physical obstacle. Her main problem is that she’s not fully informed of all of the facts. When this situation is corrected, there’s absolutely nothing stopping her from microwaving her opponents right into stardust. There’s little contentment seeing the comeuppance, though, due to the fact that we never ever disliked, nor feared her villains in the very first area.
What Worked?
On the plus side, the movie has one of the most adorable Stan Lee cameos a sweet send-off to the male that birthed this universe.
In addition it was really enjoyable seeing Phil Coulson back on the silver screen. I hope that this is the start of his greater integration into the MCU as a whole and perhaps a re-alignment of AOS and the MCU.
Finally – probably the best character in the film cannot go without praise. And that of course is Goose the Cat!
Doctor Who is a long running British science-fiction series. In fact, it’s been nearly ongoing since 1963. The show follows the adventures of an alien from the planet Gallifrey known as The Doctor, who explores the universe in a time-travelling spaceship called a TARDIS. Now, that’s as far as we’ll go with the show’s bio. If you’re a fan of the show then you already know this and if you’re not, well, it just gets stranger (and more fun!) from there.
There have been 851 episodes to date, but we’re limiting our list to the new Doctor Who run (I suppose you could call it a regeneration) which began in 2005 and is affectionately known as ‘New Who’.
The show just finished it’s eleventh season, with Jodie Whittaker taking over as The Doctor (Thirteen), and Chris Chibnall now showrunner.
Change feels good.
Honestly, I haven’t been this excited about Doctor Who since David Tennant (Ten) left, but I do think some of the villains fell a little short of what we’re used to. In fact, most villains this season seemed to be, well, human. I’m all for social commentary, but sometimes you just want a good ol’ monster!
So, let’s countdown the top 5 New Who monsters and villains that I wish Thirteen could face off against as her previous selves once did.
Number #5: The Unknown Entity (Series 4)
When the Doctor visits the resort planet ‘Midnight’, a shuttle trip is scuppered by a break down and the emergence of a bodiless entity which repeats everything anyone says.
What sounds like an annoying playground game becomes very frightening very quickly, and hysteria descends on the Doctor’s travelling group. With Leslie Sharp playing a perfectly possessed passenger, things get really weird when the entity begins predicting what the Doctor says next.
Source: https://docohobigfinish.blogspot.com/2013/10/midnight-written-by-russell-t-davies.html
Soon, the entity switches tactic, possessing the Doctor and forcing him to order his own execution. Terrifying for both Ten and Whovians alike!
Luckily, Ten escapes unscathed but is definitely traumatised. Can’t say I blame him. We never do find out what the entity really was, or how many of them are out there…
Number #4: The Boneless (Series 8)
Source: https://whatelseisonblog.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/flatline-doctor-who/
Two-dimensional beings invading our 3D world and disrupting the laws of size and scale to do it, the Boneless manifest their reality-warping powers in many unsettling forms – from turning one victim’s innards into an abstract mural in one persons’ room, to flattening many others in the walls and tunnels of London.
Their final form is the creepiest, a shambling mass of crawling, barely-there zombies who can only be defeated by the wave of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver and a heroic speech.
Number #3: Vashta Nerada (Series 4)
Say what you will about Steven Moffat’s time running Doctor Who, he knows how to craft fantastic monsters by amplifying everyday fears into terrifying creatures. Take, for instance, the Vashta Nerada, the invisible creatures that live in the shadows and just wait for you to step out of the light to devour you whole. They’re an inventive creature even when they’re not animating skeletons in spacesuits to chase you down, gobbling up flesh as fast as they do a chicken wing.
Source: https://www.geek.com/television/doctor-who-underrated-villain-of-the-week-vashta-nerada-1708120/
Let’s just thank our lucky stars that, unlike the Weeping Angels, Moffat didn’t run the Vashta Nerada into the ground.
Number #2: The Family of Blood (Series 3)
You don’t need creepy creature effects to make a good monster, and in fact Who often couldn’t afford them.
In season 3’s best two-parter, The Doctor uses a Chameleon Arch to turn human in order to escape the relentless Family of Blood – a group of aliens who seek the regenerative powers of Time Lords.
Source: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Family_of_Blood_(TV_story)
The way the Family turned innocent people in WWI-era Britain – including a little girl carrying a balloon à la Pennywise from IT – into shrieking villains, made them so intimidating. Perhaps the creepiest thing about them isn’t anything they did, but the fearful rage they brought out in the Doctor himself, as the defeated Family are each subjected to a fairy-tale punishment you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
Number #1: Silence (Series 6)
You might think that a face like this is difficult to forget, but that’s exactly the power that the Silence possesses.
With a look inspired by Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, the Silence is a religious order which has plagued humanity for centuries, but everyone’s oblivious because it’s impossible to remember them. With electrokinetic powers and the ability to reduce anyone to ash at a moment’s notice, the Silence have supposedly engineered all of human history without us realising.
Which means you might’ve already seen them today. Maybe they’re right behind you, right now.
As a rule, anything which worries the Doctor is something worth worrying about.
Here’s the thing that makes this special so frustrating: it’s proof the team could do it all along.
“Resolution” holds back the Daleks for an entire season, brings back exactly one, gives it no fleet and no empire, and produces the most frightening hour of the Whittaker era by a distance. Everything the run had been missing turns up at once. A monster with genuine menace. Escalating threat. A location used properly. Jeopardy that isn’t resolved by a speech.
One Dalek. That’s all it took.
Buried Under Sheffield
The cold open is the best in the era. Ninth century, a Dalek defeated by a coalition of every army on Earth, cut into three pieces, and each piece carried to a separate corner of the world by a custodian sworn to guard it forever.
Two of those pieces are still buried. One is under Sheffield, and two archaeologists in a basement have just found it.
What crawls out of the casing is the thing this show almost never shows you. A Dalek mutant, out of its shell, on the floor of a dig site: tentacled, wet, and moving with real purpose. It’s a genuinely horrible practical effect and the episode lets you look at it.
Then it climbs up a woman’s spine and takes control of her, and “Resolution” becomes a possession thriller for the next twenty minutes.
The Best Dalek in Fifteen Years
Charlotte Ritchie is exceptional as Lin. The performance is all wrongness. Her head snapping to angles a neck shouldn’t manage, her arm moving without her, the terror underneath the flat delivery when she’s forced to speak with the Dalek’s voice. She plays a woman trapped inside her own body watching it commit murders.
And the Dalek has a plan that’s actually clever. It’s a reconnaissance scout, not a warrior. Its job was to survey a planet and call in an invasion fleet. So it uses Lin to steal what it needs, breaks into GCHQ for a transmitter, and starts building itself a new casing in a workshop out of scrap metal, welding torches and salvaged parts.
The junkyard Dalek is a superb image. Riveted, uneven, obviously improvised, with a rocket launcher bolted to it. It looks wrong and it looks lethal, and when it finally rolls out and starts exterminating a police cordon, the sequence has weight because the episode spent forty minutes earning it.
The Doctor’s line, that this is a Dalek and it doesn’t need an army, is finally backed up by what’s on screen.
Aaron
The family material is the one wobble, though it does its job.
Ryan’s father Aaron turns up, having missed Grace’s funeral, and the episode has to carry a reconciliation arc alongside a Dalek invasion. It’s a lot for one hour, and the seams show. Aaron is written a little thin, and the resolution comes fast.
But the payoff works, because it’s built on what the season actually established. Graham is the one who confronts him, and Graham has standing to do it. The scene where he tells Aaron exactly what he missed is Bradley Walsh doing what he’s done all season, which is quietly out-acting the material.
And the climax uses it properly. Aaron holds a microwave oven against the Dalek to cook it, at real risk to himself, and Ryan pulls him free. The estranged father earns his way back by nearly dying for his son. That’s a clean piece of construction.
Why It Works and the Season Didn’t
The difference is not budget. It’s discipline.
There’s one monster. It has clear rules and clear goals. It escalates: first a mutant, then a possession, then a machine, then a killing spree. Each stage is worse than the last. The location is specific, the stakes are personal before they’re global, and nobody stops the story to explain what any of it means.
There’s a theme in here about family and abandonment, and it arrives entirely through Aaron’s actions rather than through anyone announcing it. That’s the whole trick, and the season managed it maybe twice in eleven attempts.
The UNIT gag is the era’s sharpest joke and its most pointed one. The Doctor calls for help and is told UNIT operations are suspended pending funding review, due to disputes over international funding contributions. A show that spent a season delivering its politics in speeches lands its best political line as a throwaway.
Restraint as a Strategy
Holding the Daleks back for a full season was the single best decision of the Chibnall era, and it’s worth understanding why it worked.
By 2018 the Daleks had been devalued by overuse. They turned up most years, usually in fleets, usually announcing an empire, and were usually beaten inside forty minutes. Familiarity had turned the most frightening thing in British television into a reliable seasonal fixture. You cannot be scared of something that loses every December.
Taking them off the board for eleven episodes resets that. When one finally appears it arrives with weight, and the episode compounds the effect by scaling down rather than up. No fleet. No Davros. No Skaro. One scout, buried, improvising.
It’s the same logic that made the Weeping Angels work in Blink and then wore them out over the following decade. Scarcity does most of the heavy lifting. The show knows this and keeps forgetting it.
Where It Leaves the Era
This is the high point of the Whittaker run for me, and it comes as a standalone special rather than as part of a season, which feels about right.
Everything I wanted from Series 11 is in this hour. The fam are excellent, and this time they’re in a story worthy of them. The Doctor is frightened, and being frightened makes her interesting. There’s a monster you’d actually cross the road to avoid. Set it beside The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos three weeks earlier and the gap is embarrassing.
Whether the show learned anything from it is a separate question, and the answer involves a Timeless Child, so let’s leave that where it is.
The Custodians
One more thing I liked, because it’s the sort of detail this season almost never bothered with.
The three custodians who carried the pieces of the Dalek to separate corners of the world took an oath binding their descendants forever. The episode confirms that the order held for over a thousand years, across generations of people who never saw the thing they were guarding and had only a story to go on.
That’s a lovely bit of implied history. It costs one line of dialogue and it makes the world feel older than the episode. It also raises the obvious question of what happened to the third piece and the line that was guarding it, which the show leaves hanging.
Small worldbuilding like this is what separates a monster story from a monster appearance. It suggests events continuing outside the frame. Series 11 spent eleven weeks in places that felt built for a single episode and then dismantled.
What Resolution Leaves Us With
The era’s best hour, and its clearest lesson. Here’s what it plants:
- The mutant, out of its shell. A wet, tentacled thing crawling across a dig site floor. The show finally shows you what’s inside.
- Lin. Charlotte Ritchie playing a woman piloted from within, all wrong angles and trapped terror. The best guest performance of the era.
- A Dalek built from scrap. Riveted, improvised, lethal. The most memorable design of the Whittaker run.
- Aaron and the microwave. An absent father earning his way back by nearly dying. Theme delivered through action, not dialogue.
- One monster, escalating. Mutant, then possession, then machine, then massacre. Proof the team could do this whenever they chose to.
Rating: 3.5/5 — Tense, nasty and properly frightening, with the best monster work of the era and a cast finally given something worth doing. The family subplot is crowded and Aaron is thin, but this is the hour that shows what Series 11 should have been every week. Restraint with the Daleks paid off completely.
A thousand years in the ground, three pieces, and one of them woke up in Sheffield. No fleet, no empire, no saucers. Just one of them, and it was nearly enough.
A season finale has to resolve something. That’s the entire job. Series 11 spent ten weeks deliberately avoiding an arc, which left this episode with nothing to pay off, so it goes back to the first episode and brings back the villain nobody was asking about.
“The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos” is a finale in scheduling only. There’s no battle worth the name, no scale, and no sense that anything has been building. It is, by a comfortable margin, the flattest note this era ends on.
There is one good thing in it, and I’ll get to him.
Tim Shaw, Again
Tzim-Sha survived The Woman Who Fell to Earth and has spent the intervening time on Ranskoor Av Kolos being worshipped as a god.
The setup isn’t bad on paper. He crashed here, half-dead, and was found by the Ux, a two-person species with the ability to reshape reality through faith. They mistook him for their deity. He has been using them for millennia to build a weapon that steals entire planets and shrinks them into stasis, held in a chamber in his temple.
That’s a genuinely enormous crime. He has stolen five inhabited worlds and has them hanging in jars.
None of it registers, because Tim Shaw remains the same inert lump he was in episode one. Samuel Oatley does what he can under the prosthetics, but the character has no menace, no wit and no presence. He shuffles, he wheezes, he threatens. The show keeps telling us he’s a monster and never once makes us feel it.
You cannot build a finale on a villain the audience has already dismissed.
Nothing Has Any Scale
The production can’t afford what the script describes and doesn’t find a way around it.
Five stolen planets. A weapon that unmakes worlds. A species that shapes reality with belief. All of this happens in a small set of grey corridors with about six people in it. The Ux are two people in a room. The planets are glowing marbles in a cabinet. The battle of the title consists of the fam walking through some fog and then standing in a chamber talking.
Compare it to any previous finale. Davros and a stolen Earth. The Pandorica opening. The Cybermen coming up the floors of a colony ship. Those episodes made you feel the size of the threat even when the budget was straining. This one makes the destruction of five civilisations feel like a filing problem.
Mark Addy turns up as Paltraki, a decent, weary salvage captain who has lost his crew and his memory, and he’s fine, and the episode has no idea what to do with him either.
Graham Is the Only Reason to Watch
Here’s the good part.
Graham has been carrying a pistol since the last episode and he has told Ryan exactly what he intends to do. When he gets Tim Shaw alone, disabled and helpless, he has every reason and every opportunity.
He doesn’t kill him. He locks him in one of his own stasis chambers instead, which is both a better punishment and a decision that lets Graham stay who he is.
Bradley Walsh plays the whole sequence with a stillness that the rest of the episode can’t match, and Ryan turning up to stand beside him is the closing of the only real relationship this season built. Ryan calls him Grandad again. The two of them earned this over ten weeks, and it’s the sole thread that pays off.
It’s a good five minutes in a bad fifty.
The Doctor Has No Answer
There’s a moment that ought to be the centre of the episode and lands as an accident.
Tim Shaw’s whole grievance is that the Doctor humiliated him and cost him his position among the Stenza. Everything he has done since, the stolen worlds, the false godhood, the millennia of manipulation, follows from the day she beat him in Sheffield. That’s a real idea. The Doctor’s habit of winning and walking away has consequences, and here is one of them standing in front of her wearing a crown.
The show gestures at it and then declines to engage. She never has to answer for it, never has to weigh what her victory cost five planets, and the script gives her no moment of doubt. She simply treats him as a nuisance to be filed away.
Compare that to A Good Man Goes to War, where the Eleventh Doctor’s reputation built an entire fortress full of people waiting for him. That story made him look at it. This one changes the subject.
The Structural Failure
This is where I get properly annoyed, because the problem isn’t this episode. It’s the plan.
Chibnall decided against a season arc. Fair enough as a reaction to years of increasingly convoluted Moffat mystery boxes. But an anthology season only works if the individual stories are strong enough to stand alone, and this run produced two I’d genuinely recommend. The rest were themes in monster costumes.
So the finale arrives with nothing to conclude. No villain has been seeded except the one from week one that didn’t work. No mystery has been running. The Timeless Child was mentioned once, in episode two, and is not referred to again all season. That’s not restraint. That’s a hook dropped and forgotten, later dragged back to justify a rewrite of the Doctor’s origin that I still think is the worst decision this programme has ever made.
An arc would have given the season a spine. Better standalone monsters would have made an arc unnecessary. Doing neither leaves you with this.
Signing Off Without a Send-Off
The other thing a finale usually does is mark an ending, and this one can’t even manage that.
Nobody leaves. Nothing changes about the TARDIS crew. There’s no cliffhanger, no regeneration, no cost carried forward. The four of them walk back into the ship and the episode stops, and the era’s first year closes on a shrug. Even the New Year special that follows isn’t set up here in any way.
That’s a defensible choice if the season has been about something. Series 5 ended with a wedding and a reset. Series 9 ended with a memory wiped and a diner in the desert. Both earned their quiet by having spent thirteen weeks building toward it.
Here there’s nothing to be quiet about. The season’s only genuine arc, Graham’s grief, resolves fifteen minutes before the credits, and then the show has another half hour of plot to get through and no idea what to do with it.
The Ux deserve one more mention. A species who build with belief, in a show about a character whose enemies are made powerful by what people believe about him, and the episode uses them as a lever.
What Ranskoor Av Kolos Leaves Us With
A finale with nothing to finish. Here’s what it plants:
- Tim Shaw returns. The season’s weakest villain promoted to final boss, still shuffling, still not frightening.
- Five stolen worlds, in a cupboard. Enormous stakes rendered as marbles in a cabinet. No scale anywhere.
- The Ux. A species who reshape reality through faith, given two rooms and no exploration.
- Graham doesn’t shoot him. The one genuine payoff in the hour, ten weeks in the building, and Bradley Walsh nails it.
- No arc to resolve. The structural choice of the season comes due, and there’s nothing in the account.
Rating: 1.5/5 — A finale in name only: no scale, no threat, no accumulated weight, built around the villain the season had already proved didn’t work. Graham and Ryan get a real ending and everything around them is filler. A limp close to a run that never decided what it wanted to be.
Five stolen planets in a glass case and a god nobody believed in. The best moment was an old man choosing not to pull a trigger. That should tell you where the season’s strength always was.
Nine episodes into a season that mostly played it safe, somebody finally did something odd. “It Takes You Away” is a strange, lopsided, genuinely unpredictable hour that starts as Nordic horror, becomes a portal fantasy, spends ten minutes in a cave with a goblin, and ends with a woman having a conversation with a sentient universe that has taken the form of a frog. I have no idea whether it’s good. I’m fairly sure it’s the most interesting thing this season attempted, and after weeks of functional monsters and delivered themes, interesting counts for a lot.
The best opening of the season
The first act is superb and it’s almost entirely quiet. A boarded-up cabin in a Norwegian fjord, no one inside, food on the table, and a blind teenage girl called Hanne alone and terrified. Her father Erik has been gone four days. Every afternoon at the same time a monstrous roar comes from the woods, and she’s been surviving alone by counting steps and timing the noise. Ellie Wallwork is excellent, and the writing around her disability is the best in the season by miles. She isn’t a lesson or a symbol. She’s a frightened, competent, extremely annoyed teenager who has worked out her own survival routine and doesn’t want strangers reorganising it. The show simply lets her be capable. The reveal that the roar is a speaker rigged in the trees, and that her father set it up to keep her indoors while he went somewhere, is a proper gut-punch.
The bit in the middle
Then there’s a mirror in the bedroom that isn’t a mirror, and the episode goes through it into an anti-zone, and things get scruffy. The anti-zone is a buffer, a cave system between universes, populated by flesh moths and a creature called Ribbons. He’s a grubby, wheedling little smuggler with a lantern, and Kevin Eldon plays him as pure Dickensian nastiness. He’s a fun character with a good design, and the episode has no real use for him. He haggles, he lies, he steals the lamp, and he’s eaten by moths about four minutes after arriving. This whole stretch feels like a different production. It’s the cheapest-looking sequence in the run and it delays the actual story. Whatever budget the fjords ate, the caves paid for.
On the far side is the world the episode is actually about. Erik has been going through the mirror because his dead wife is there. Trine is alive, warm, exactly as he remembers, and he has been abandoning his blind daughter in a cabin to spend afternoons with her. That’s a properly ugly piece of human weakness and the episode doesn’t excuse it. And then Graham turns a corner and Grace is standing there. Bradley Walsh has been the best thing in this season since the first episode, and this is his hour. He knows it isn’t her. He says so, out loud, repeatedly, and he keeps talking to her anyway, because she’s right there and she’s laughing at his jokes. The performance is all restraint: a man being offered exactly what he wants, understanding precisely what’s being done to him, and having to decide anyway. The tell is small and perfect. This Grace wouldn’t climb the crane. The real one did, in The Woman Who Fell to Earth, and it killed her. That’s the moment he knows, and it’s the moment he lets go.
A frog on a chair
The explanation is where the episode either wins you or loses you completely. The mirror world is the Solitract, a conscious universe that was exiled before existence began because its reality was fundamentally incompatible with everything else. It has been alone since before time. It builds worlds and populates them with what people love, because it wants company, and it cannot help destroying anything that stays. The Doctor talks it down in a white void, where it appears to her as a talking frog on a chair, using the voice of a woman Erik loved. It’s absurd. It’s also the only moment in the season where the Doctor solves something by being kind to a lonely thing rather than by identifying a technical weakness, and Whittaker plays the scene with total sincerity. She isn’t defeating it. She’s persuading a desperately lonely entity to let her friends go home, by offering to stay herself, and then being refused because it likes her too much to keep her. I can see exactly why people hate it. A frog on a chair is a hard sell. I’d still rather this show swing at something this weird and half-miss than produce another competent hour about a corporation.
The mirror world that gives back your dead is not a new device, and the episode knows it. This is the Land of Fiction, the Valeyard’s illusions, the Nethersphere, the amber-preserved memory of half a dozen previous stories. Doctor Who returns to the false paradise every few years because it’s a reliable engine: build a version of what somebody wants, then make them choose. What’s different here is the motive. Usually the trap is set by something malicious that feeds on the captive. The Solitract isn’t feeding. It genuinely wants a friend, has no concept of the harm it causes, and lets everyone go once it understands. There’s no villain in the episode at all, which is a startling thing for a season to attempt this late in its run. Ed Hime’s script has a loose, slightly hallucinatory quality that nothing else this year comes close to. It’s the only hour that feels like it was written by someone with a specific sensibility rather than to a brief.
What it fixes
The real function of the episode is Graham, and it works. He walks away from his dead wife, and then Ryan calls him “Grandad” for the first time. That’s the season’s one genuine character arc closing, and it lands because it’s been built patiently across nine weeks rather than announced. The fam remain what’s good here. Everything I’ve liked about this run has been these four people. Every complaint I’ve got is about what was put in front of them.
There’s one persistent irritation, and this is the ninth time I’ve written it. Yaz is present throughout and has almost nothing to do. She helps Hanne, she asks the Doctor clarifying questions, she reacts. Mandip Gill is good in every scene she’s given and the season keeps declining to give her any. Three companions was always going to squeeze someone, and the arithmetic has consistently fallen on her. Graham has the grief and the arc. Ryan has the father and the dyspraxia and the relationship with Graham. Yaz has one excellent episode in Demons of the Punjab and ten weeks of standing slightly to the left of the plot. It’s the clearest sign that the crew size was a decision made for the poster rather than for the writing.
What it leaves behind is Hanne, a blind teenager written as capable and irritated rather than as a lesson, the best guest character of the run. It leaves a speaker in the trees, a father faking a monster to keep his daughter indoors while he visits his dead wife, which is genuinely nasty. It leaves the anti-zone, a cheap-looking detour with a good character in it and nothing for him to do. It leaves Graham and Grace, Bradley Walsh knowing it isn’t her and staying in the room anyway, the best acting of the season. And it leaves a lonely universe, solved by conversation and kindness rather than a technical fix, in the form of a frog, which is ridiculous and sincere and I’m glad it exists.
Rating: 3/5. Wildly uneven, baggy in the middle, and the only episode this season with real imagination behind it. The Norwegian opening is the best sustained sequence of the run and the cave section is the worst. Graham’s goodbye earns the whole thing. Your tolerance for the frog will decide the rest. A cabin, a mirror, and a universe so lonely it built a world just to have someone to talk to. Daft as anything. First time all season I didn’t know what was coming.
There’s one idea in this episode that genuinely justifies casting a woman as the Doctor, and it’s a good one. For fifty years this character has walked into a room, produced a piece of psychic paper, announced they’re in charge, and been believed. Drop her into Lancashire in 1612 and none of that works, because nobody in that village is going to take orders from a woman. “The Witchfinders” understands this. It’s the only episode of the season that does anything with the Doctor’s gender beyond a passing joke, and when it stays on that idea it’s sharp. Then there’s a mud monster.
Pendle
The setting is a gift. Witch trials, a village drowning its own people, a landowner running the ducking stool. Joy Wilkinson’s script gets the texture right: the ordinary neighbours who show up to watch, the way accusation spreads once it’s been made profitable, the total absence of anywhere to appeal. Siobhan Finneran is very good as Becka Savage, the landowner presiding over the killings with a conviction that curdles into panic as the episode goes on. She’s hanged thirty-six people. She’s also, crucially, a woman who has secured her own power by being the loudest enforcer of the system that would otherwise crush her, and Finneran plays that with no sympathy asked for. The ducking sequence is properly grim. The Doctor arrives mid-execution, tries to stop it with authority she doesn’t have, and fails. Someone dies in front of her while she’s still explaining who she is.
That’s the good stuff, and it keeps going. Graham gets handed the Witchfinder General’s hat and is instantly assumed to be the one in charge. The Doctor’s protests are treated as a woman making noise. She dives in to save a drowning woman and is immediately accused of witchcraft herself. By the third act she’s tied to the ducking stool with the King of England presiding over her execution. Whittaker plays the mounting frustration well, and her line about how she’d have sorted this out in a heartbeat in her old body is the best joke in the run, because it’s true and because it stings. It’s a real idea, dramatised rather than announced, which is what Rosa kept failing to do. The episode doesn’t have anyone deliver a speech about seventeenth-century misogyny. It just removes the Doctor’s authority and lets you watch her cope without it.
Alan Cumming is in a different programme
King James I is the most entertaining thing here and also completely destabilises the tone. Alan Cumming plays him as a camp, paranoid, flirtatious, wounded man who is genuinely frightened of Satan and genuinely attracted to Ryan, and he is having the time of his life. Every line reading is enormous. The performance is legitimately funny. The trouble is that the episode around him is about state-sanctioned murder of women, and the two pitches don’t mix. One scene is a woman being drowned by her neighbours, the next is Cumming doing a double take. The whiplash is severe, and the episode never decides which show it wants to be. His backstory lands, mind. The father murdered, the mother who abandoned him, the lifelong terror of being got at. It’s a genuinely sad portrait, buried under a lot of mugging.
The episode has a fourth strong element that gets squeezed out, and it’s a shame. Willa Twiston is a young herbalist whose grandmother has just been drowned as a witch, and who is next in line for the accusation because she knows which plants do what. Tilly Steele plays her as frightened and practical, and the episode briefly has something genuinely interesting in hand: the woman with actual useful knowledge is the one most at risk from a community hunting for supernatural explanations. That’s the real history of witch trials in one character, because midwives and herbalists and widows with property were disproportionately the accused, since expertise in a woman looked like power and power looked like the devil. The script raises it and then needs her to run down corridors instead. Yaz gets a decent scene protecting her, which is at least Yaz getting something to do, and then the plot swallows both of them.
And then, mud
The Morax are where it collapses. The alien threat is a prison colony sealed under Pendle Hill, released when Becka cut down the tree that capped their prison. They reanimate corpses, which become mud zombies, which shuffle about the woods. They look terrible. Not stylised, not cheap-but-effective, just bad: grey clay faces with glowing eyes, moving slowly through fog. Every time one appears the episode’s carefully built dread evaporates. The Morax Queen possesses Becka, delivers some standard threat-of-conquest dialogue, and is defeated by being lured back to the hill and re-sealed. None of it connects to the witch trials in any meaningful way. The village has been murdering innocent women for years without alien assistance, which is the horrifying and true thing the episode had in hand. Adding actual supernatural evil to a story about false accusations of supernatural evil is a category error. It muddles the one point worth making.
Take the Morax out. Keep Becka, keep James, keep a Doctor who can’t get anyone to listen. You’d have a tight, nasty historical about how a community talks itself into murder, with a lead character stripped of her usual tools. That episode is right here, three-quarters written. The season’s format demanded a monster, so it got one, and the monster is made of clay. Eight episodes in, I’ve stopped expecting this run to trust a story without one. Doctor Who has a long history with witch-hunt stories and this one sits low in the pile. “The Daemons” understood that the power of the setting comes from a village turning on itself. “The Masque of Mandragora” and “The Awakening” both used superstition as a lens on real social control. Even The Shakespeare Code, which is a much sillier episode, had the sense to make its witches genuinely theatrical and to keep the historical figure at the centre of the plot rather than orbiting it. What those stories share is a refusal to let the supernatural element off the hook. If you introduce real magic into a story about false accusations of magic, you have to reckon with what that does to the accusers. Were they right? Partly right? The episode never asks. There’s also a missed opportunity in James himself. A king who wrote a book on demonology, presiding over the execution of a woman who genuinely is from another world, is a delicious irony that the script notices and does nothing with.
What it leaves behind is authority removed, with Graham getting the hat and the deference while the Doctor gets accused, the best use of the gender change in the entire era. It leaves Becka Savage, Siobhan Finneran as a woman enforcing the system that would otherwise destroy her, played without a plea for sympathy. It leaves Alan Cumming, wildly entertaining and in a completely different programme from the one about drowning women. It leaves the Morax, mud zombies that look dreadful and mean nothing, in a story about false accusations of the supernatural. And it leaves a historical that dramatises instead of lecturing, with no speeches, because the situation makes the argument and it works.
Rating: 2.5/5. A strong idea, a great guest performance and the season’s smartest use of its own casting, dragged down by a rubbish monster that actively undercuts the point. There’s a very good episode in here with the aliens deleted. As broadcast, it’s half a good one. A village drowning its neighbours, a king terrified of the devil, and a Doctor nobody would listen to. All it needed was to leave the mud in the ground.
Finally, an episode that remembers this is an adventure show. “Kerblam!” is the most conventional hour of the season and it’s a relief. The Doctor gets a fez delivered by a robot postman, finds “HELP ME” written on the packing slip, and takes the fam undercover in the galaxy’s largest fulfilment warehouse to find out who sent it. Mystery, infiltration, a body count, killer bubble wrap. It moves. It’s also the episode people are still arguing about, and the argument is more interesting than most of what this season provoked.
An actual plot
The pleasure here is in the shape of the thing. There’s a question at the top, the question has an answer, and the answer is arrived at through investigation rather than a speech. The warehouse is a good setting, properly established for once: ten percent organic workforce, ninety percent automated, a moon-sized operation with a distribution centre, dormitories and a conveyor system you can actually picture. Pete McTighe bothers to build a place, which after The Tsuranga Conundrum feels like a courtesy. The Kerblam Men are a strong design, white and blank and permanently cheerful, unsettling precisely because they never stop being polite. There’s a genuinely good sequence with a teleport that arrives with only half a person, and the moment where the robots start marching in step is the closest this season comes to real menace. Splitting the fam up across warehouse jobs is smart, too. Ryan and Yaz on the picking floor, Graham on cleaning duty with a mop and a superb line about being invisible to management, the Doctor talking her way into the systems room. Everyone has something to do.
The horror lands because it’s aimed at the one character you’re not braced for. Kira is a sweet, slightly lonely packer who befriends Ryan and has never been given a present. So the system gives her one, and she opens it, and the bubble wrap kills her while Charlie watches through the glass. It’s a nasty, effective piece of television. The pop of each individual bubble is worse than any amount of screaming, and Claudia Jessie plays the delight turning to confusion perfectly. That’s the moment the episode earns its stripes as a thriller, and turning bubble wrap into a murder weapon puts this squarely in the show’s long tradition of ruining ordinary objects.
The twist everyone fought about
Then the reveal, and this is where it gets interesting. The distress signal didn’t come from a worker being exploited by the machine. It came from the system itself. Kerblam’s central intelligence noticed that a human employee was planning a terrorist attack, and reached out to the Doctor for help, because it couldn’t stop him alone. Charlie, the shy maintenance lad, is the villain. He’s radicalised against automation, he’s loaded thousands of parcels with lethal bubble wrap, and his plan is to trigger a mass casualty event so appalling that the public turns against robot labour and the jobs come back. Kira wasn’t collateral. He chose her, to make the point land. So the anti-corporate setup inverts. The company is not the villain. The machine is not the villain. The angry man with a cause who decided people were an acceptable price is the villain.
I like it because it’s the one time this season a script sets up an expectation and then refuses to deliver the comfortable version. Everything about the first half says the warehouse is going to be indicted. Instead the episode says the system was working and a person broke it. The Doctor’s closing line, that systems aren’t the problem and people are, is a properly contentious thing for this show to say and I respect the nerve. What bothers me is that it doesn’t follow through. Kerblam responds to the crisis by going to ninety percent organic staffing, which concedes the exact argument the episode just spent an hour dismantling. And nobody addresses the fact that the system solved its terrorism problem by killing an innocent woman as bait. That’s a monstrous act, waved through in the edit. There’s a braver episode here that sits with the discomfort. This one wants the twist without the consequences.
There’s also a bit of fan service that actually earns its place. The Kerblam Man’s delivery, the fez, and above all the Doctor pulling out an old-fashioned paper-and-string parcel all point back to the show’s long line of cheerfully lethal service machines, and the teleport that delivers a partial body is exactly the sort of gruesome throwaway the classic series specialised in. It works because it’s texture rather than plot. The episode doesn’t stop to explain the reference or expect applause for it, which is more than a lot of the modern show manages. Graham’s mop, incidentally, gets more characterisation than most of this season’s guest cast. A man who has spent his life being looked past, using it deliberately, is a good gag with a real edge on it.
Charlie doesn’t quite work
The one performance problem is the villain, and it’s a casting and writing issue rather than an idea issue. Leo Flanagan plays Charlie as so meek and so obviously nervous that the reveal reads less as a shock than as a relief that somebody finally did something. A radicalised man who murdered a colleague to make a political point needs either genuine conviction or genuine coldness, and he has neither. He mostly seems embarrassed. The script also gives him his ideology in a single burst at the end rather than seeding it. Everything he says about automation destroying communities is reasonable, which is the interesting part, and none of it has been visible in his behaviour for the previous forty minutes. Compare it with how carefully Demons of the Punjab builds Manish from ordinary young man to killer across a whole episode. Same idea, radicalisation ending in murder, executed with far more patience two weeks earlier.
Set against the rest of the run, though, this is the shape the season should have used more often. There’s a monster, a mystery, a location with rules, and jeopardy that escalates. The theme is present but it arrives through plot rather than being announced. Nobody stops the story to explain what it means. When the episode has something to say it says it in the last two minutes and then stops. That’s all I wanted from this season: a creature, a place, a problem, and characters I like solving it. Seven episodes in, it happened once.
What it leaves behind is a warehouse that exists, with established geography and real rules and an operation you can picture, which is basic and rarer here than it should be. It leaves the Kerblam Men, relentlessly cheerful and blank-faced and genuinely creepy when they start marching. It leaves Kira and the bubble wrap, the most effective horror beat of the season and the cruellest. It leaves a twist that refuses the obvious read, where the company isn’t guilty and the machine isn’t guilty and the radicalised man is, which is contentious and the better for it. And it leaves a conclusion that flinches, conceding the argument it won and never addressing the system using an innocent as bait.
Rating: 3/5. A proper adventure with a real mystery, a strong location and a twist with actual teeth, let down by an ending that won’t commit to its own position. After six weeks of themes wearing monster costumes, an hour that just tells a story is worth a great deal. Killer bubble wrap, a cheerful robot postman, and a villain who thought a massacre was a message. More of this, please, and fewer speeches.
This is the one the season gets right, and the reason it works is instructive: the science fiction and the history are doing the same job instead of fighting each other. Vinay Patel’s script takes Yaz back to the Punjab in August 1947, on the day the border was drawn, to find out why her grandmother owns a broken watch she won’t discuss. What she finds is Umbreen as a young woman, about to marry a Hindu man named Prem, on the week the line came down between them. It’s the best hour of the Whittaker era. It’s also, quietly, an argument against how the rest of the season was written.
A historical that isn’t a lecture
Rosa told you what to think about Montgomery. This episode doesn’t tell you anything about Partition. It just puts you in a field with people who are about to lose everything and lets you watch. There’s no caption at the end. No song. No summary of the death toll. The episode trusts that a wedding, a brother, and a border are enough, and they are. Nobody makes a speech about the tragedy of sectarian violence. Instead you get Prem’s younger brother Manish, who has been reading pamphlets and listening to men on the radio, hardening in front of you across a handful of scenes until he’s capable of what he does. Shane Zaza plays Prem as a decent, tired man who fought in a war and came home wanting a quiet life. Amita Suman is superb as young Umbreen. The relationship is written with enough specificity that you believe it before you’re asked to mourn it.
The best monster idea of the season
The Thijarians are the reason this episode belongs on Doctor Who rather than in a straight historical drama. They arrive looking like exactly what the season has trained you to expect: armoured, silent, teleporting in and out, standing over the dead. The Doctor identifies them as the deadliest assassins in the known universe. Everything about the staging says villain. They’re mourners. Their homeworld was destroyed and their people died unwitnessed, and so they have given themselves a new purpose, which is to travel to the deaths that nobody sees and to be present for them, so that no one dies alone and unremarked. They aren’t here to kill Prem. They’re here because he’s about to die and no one else will know. That’s a genuinely beautiful idea, and it changes the whole episode the moment it arrives. It also does something the season otherwise never manages, which is to make the alien element inseparable from the human one. Take the Thijarians out and you lose the entire theme. Take Krasko out of Rosa and you lose nothing.
The structure is the old fixed-point problem, and this time it has teeth, because the person trapped by it is a companion. Yaz cannot save Prem. If Prem lives, Umbreen never marries Yaz’s grandfather, and Yaz is never born. She has to stand in a field and let a man she has come to like be murdered by his own brother, so that she can continue to exist. That’s a properly cruel piece of writing and Mandip Gill is finally given something to play. This is the only episode in the run where Yaz is the protagonist rather than the third companion, and Gill is more than good enough to carry it. It makes the season’s chronic underuse of her more annoying, not less. The Doctor officiating the wedding is a lovely beat. So is her quiet refusal to pretend it will be fine.
Manish, and the craft
The episode’s real achievement is that it doesn’t make the villain a monster. Manish isn’t possessed, brainwashed or alien-influenced. He’s a young man who absorbed what was in the air, decided his brother’s marriage was a betrayal, and called men with guns. He believes he’s doing the right thing for his country. He is entirely ordinary, and that’s the horror. Doctor Who usually can’t resist externalising this sort of thing into a creature you can defeat. Here there’s nothing to defeat. The Doctor and the fam leave, and Prem stands alone in a field waiting for the men who are coming, and the Thijarians arrive to watch him die. Then Umbreen’s watch, which Yaz has been holding all episode, means something completely different.
The production finally matches the writing here, and it’s worth noting how much of that is small decisions. Jamie Childs shoots the Punjab in warm gold rather than the flat grey the season defaults to, and the wedding is staged with enough space to let the ritual play out at its own pace. Segun Akinola’s score is the best in the run: sparse, using regional instrumentation without turning it into travelogue music, and confident enough to drop out entirely in the last ten minutes. The costume and production design do quiet work too, because this is a rural farming community rather than a heritage postcard, and the clothes look worn and lived in. Most importantly, the edit is patient. Scenes are allowed to end on a held look rather than cutting to the next plot beat. Every other episode this season moves at the same brisk, slightly anxious clip, as if worried you’ll switch off. This one trusts itself.
The season problem, again
Here’s my frustration. This proves the team could do it. Given a writer with a specific story and an alien concept that serves it, this production makes excellent television. The direction is warmer, the score finally has room, the cast are used properly. Nothing here is preachy, because the drama carries the meaning instead of being interrupted so someone can state it. And then the following week we’re back to functional monsters and themes delivered in dialogue. One episode in eleven finds the right pitch. That’s not a run of bad luck, it’s a preference, and this hour is the evidence that it was a choice rather than a limitation.
A note on scale, too. Partition displaced somewhere between ten and twenty million people and killed a number nobody has ever been able to fix with confidence. It is one of the largest forced migrations in recorded history and it happened inside living memory. British television has been remarkably reluctant to look at it, and a Saturday teatime family drama is an unlikely place to find the most humane treatment of it I’ve seen. The episode never states a figure, never shows a massacre, and never reaches for the epic. It stays with one farm, one wedding, one family. That restraint is the correct instinct. Atrocity at scale is unwatchable and unfeelable. One man in a field, waiting, is neither.
What it leaves behind is the Thijarians, assassins who turn out to be mourners for the unwitnessed dead, the best alien idea of the era and inseparable from the story around it. It leaves Yaz as protagonist, with Mandip Gill getting one episode of proper material and being excellent in it, which makes the other ten worse. It leaves Manish, an ordinary young man radicalised by pamphlets and radio, with no possession and no alien influence and nothing to punch. It leaves a fixed point with real teeth, let him die or cease to exist, the trap “Rosa” gestured at and this one actually springs. And it leaves no caption and no song, because the episode trusts a wedding and a field to make its point, and they do.
Rating: 3.5/5. Easily the best thing this season produced: careful, specific, superbly performed, and built on a monster concept that earns its place. It stops just short of the top rank because the middle sags and the Doctor is largely a bystander in her own show. But this is the hour that proves what the era could have been. A wedding on a border, a watch that stops, and aliens who came a very long way just to notice. One episode in eleven understood the assignment.
Every season has one. The episode that exists because thirteen weeks is a lot of television and somebody has to fill week five. “The Tsuranga Conundrum” is that episode, and it’s the flimsiest hour of a season that already had a flimsiness problem. The setup is fine. The Doctor and the fam get caught in a sonic mine blast while junk-hunting, wake up on an automated medical transport, and find a creature loose on board that eats energy and is heading for the antimatter drive. Base under siege, small cast, one monster. This is the most reliable format the show has. It doesn’t work, and it’s worth being precise about why.
The Pting is good
Let’s start with what lands, because it’s the only thing that does. The Pting is a lovely piece of design: small, grey, wide-eyed, vaguely like a gremlin crossed with a dumpling, and completely indestructible. It isn’t malicious. It just eats, and what it eats is energy, and it will chew through a spacecraft to get some. The show is smart enough to make it non-verbal and non-negotiable. There’s a good idea buried in the resolution, too. You can’t kill it, reason with it or outrun it, so the Doctor feeds it the bomb. Give the thing what it actually wants, on your terms, and it goes away happy. That’s a proper Doctor Who solution and it’s genuinely satisfying. The problem is that a monster this simple needs a ship worth defending, and the ship is cardboard.
Nobody on board is a person
The guest cast is a list of functions. Astos is the competent senior medic, and he’s killed off in the first fifteen minutes, which is the episode’s one real surprise and also removes the only guest character with any weight. Mabli is the junior medic who lacks confidence, gains confidence, and is congratulated for gaining confidence. General Cicero is a famous war hero who is dying and doesn’t want her brother to know. Her brother Durkas is bitter about their mother. Yoss is a pregnant man. None of them get past the one-line description. The episode keeps stopping to tell you how remarkable they all are, and then gives them nothing to do that would demonstrate it. When Cicero dies, the show plays it as an enormous loss for a character we’ve known for thirty minutes and learned two facts about. The male pregnancy subplot is the weakest thread: introduced as a joke, treated as a curiosity, resolved with a delivery scene and a gag about naming the baby, and with no bearing on the crisis at all. It’s there to be a talking point, not a story.
There’s a moment where the Doctor delivers a rapturous speech about the antimatter drive, and it crystallises everything wrong with this run. It’s an enthusiastic, technically detailed monologue about how brilliant the engine is. Whittaker performs it with total commitment. It’s also completely inert, because nothing in the episode depends on understanding how the drive works. The speech exists so the Doctor can be seen being clever, rather than because being clever accomplishes anything. That’s this season’s habit in miniature: tell you what the character is, rather than build a situation that proves it. Something else is going wrong here too, and it took me until week five to name it. Thirteen spends this episode being told what to do. She’s a patient, she’s confined to the medical bay, she’s overruled by protocol, and her main activity is explaining things to people who then act on them. When the crisis peaks she solves it, but the route there is passive in a way this character almost never is. Part of that is the three-companion problem. With four regulars in every scene, the Doctor has to share dialogue that would previously have been hers, and what gets cut is the connective tissue: the noticing, the poking at things, the moment where she works out what’s wrong before anyone else does. What’s left is a lot of announcing conclusions. Whittaker is good enough that you don’t feel it in any single scene. Stacked across a season, you feel it constantly.
Where’s the tension?
A base-under-siege story lives or dies on geography and dread. You need to know the layout, feel the walls closing, believe the crew might not make it. This ship has corridors that all look the same and a floor plan nobody establishes. The Pting is never genuinely hunting anyone. There’s no sequence where the fam are cornered, no moment where the thing gets close enough to be frightening. It bounces around eating cables while people talk about their families in adjacent rooms. Compare it to Midnight, which had one room, no monster you could see, and more tension in five minutes than this manages in fifty. Or the Sanctuary Base two-parter, which understood that a base under siege needs the base to feel like a real place first.
The format deserved better, and it’s instructive to look at why the good ones work. “The Ark in Space” gave you a sealed environment, a slow reveal of what had happened to the crew, and a threat that transformed people. “Horror of Fang Rock” put nine people in a lighthouse and killed them one at a time. The Impossible Planet spent half its runtime just establishing the base and the people on it before anything went wrong. All of them front-load the place. You learn the layout, the rules, who’s competent and who isn’t, and only then does the threat arrive to break it. Tension comes from knowing what’s at risk and how the walls are arranged. This episode inverts that. The Pting is loose within about ten minutes, before you know the ship or the crew, so every subsequent scare has nothing to land on. You can’t fear for people you’ve just met in rooms you can’t picture.
Ryan and Yaz do get a decent scene where he talks about his mother dying and his father not showing up, and Tosin Cole plays it without straining. Graham and Ryan helping deliver a baby is fine comedy. The four of them remain likeable company. But five episodes in, that likeability is being asked to carry entire hours on its own, and it can’t. You can’t build a season on a cast being pleasant. At some point the stories have to be worth their time.
What it leaves behind is the Pting, a genuinely good creature design, indestructible and indifferent, resolved with a properly clever bit of Doctor thinking. It leaves Astos dying early, the one shock in the episode, which removes the only guest with any presence. It leaves a ship with no map, identical corridors and no established geography and no dread, missing the format’s most basic requirement. It leaves the antimatter speech, enthusiasm as a substitute for consequence, the season’s core flaw in one monologue. And it leaves a subplot that’s a talking point, since the pregnancy thread is disconnected from the crisis and exists to be discussed rather than to matter.
Rating: 1.5/5. A reliable format, a good monster and a cast I like, wasted on a script with no tension, no geography and a guest list of single traits. The Pting deserved a better ship to eat. The weakest hour of the Whittaker era so far, and that’s a competitive field. Something small and hungry got loose on a hospital ship, and the most memorable thing about the hour was a speech about an engine. That tells you where the priorities were.
Giant spiders in a hotel is a premise that writes itself. You’ve got a confined space, a monster with a genuine phobia attached to it, and an audience that will do half the work for you. Doctor Who has been mining exactly this seam since the sixties and it almost always plays. “Arachnids in the UK” has all of that and manages to be dull, because it isn’t actually interested in the spiders. It’s interested in the man who owns the hotel, and it would much rather talk about him.
Home, briefly
The best stretch is the first fifteen minutes, and there’s barely any plot in it. The fam get home to Sheffield, and the episode lets them be people for a bit. Graham walks back into the house he shared with Grace and can’t cope with it, hearing her voice in every room, and Bradley Walsh plays a man moving through his own life like a trespasser. Her death in The Woman Who Fell to Earth is still the only thing this season has done that carries weight, and it’s the most affecting thing in the episode by a distance. Yaz finally gets a family, too. Najia Khan, her mother, is sharp and funny and immediately suspicious of the strange woman her daughter has brought home. The dinner scene is genuinely warm, and the Doctor’s total inability to behave normally in a domestic setting is good comedy. This is what the season keeps proving it’s good at: four people who like each other, in a kitchen. Then a plot turns up.
Najia has just been sacked from her job at a nearly finished luxury hotel, which is built on top of an old landfill, which is full of the discarded remains of laboratory spider experiments. Toxic waste, mutation, giant spiders. Fine. That’s a perfectly good B-movie engine. The execution is oddly bloodless. The spiders themselves are decent CGI and there’s one properly effective moment with a body wrapped in webbing in a bathroom, but the episode never builds tension in a place purpose-built for it. Corridors go unused. There’s no sequence where anyone is genuinely hunted. The hotel is huge, empty, and largely wasted. The Doctor’s solution is to lure them into a panic room with garlic and a Bluetooth speaker, which is the sort of daft, improvised nonsense I actually enjoy from this show. That bit works.
A quick word in the episode’s defence, because I’ve been hard on it. The biology here is complete rubbish. Spiders don’t scale that way, the square-cube law would have the big one collapsing under its own weight, and the idea that toxic waste produces orderly gigantism rather than dead spiders is pure 1950s drive-in. The Doctor even hand-waves it with a line about experimental mutation and moves on. I don’t mind any of that. Doctor Who has never been hard science fiction and the giant-creature story is a respectable old tradition. “Planet of the Spiders” was daft too. The complaint isn’t that the premise is silly, it’s that the episode doesn’t commit to the silliness or the horror. It plays the whole thing at a polite middle distance, too embarrassed to be a creature feature and not interested enough to be anything else. Pick a lane. B-movie schlock would have been a great watch.
The real villain is the American
Then there’s Jack Robertson. Chris Noth plays an American hotel magnate who hates Trump, wants to run against him in 2020, shoots things he doesn’t understand, and cares about nothing except his own liability. He dumped the toxic waste. He built on the landfill. He’s the actual cause. I don’t object to the target. I object to how much room he takes. Every scene he’s in stops the horror dead so somebody can make a point about corporate irresponsibility, and the points are neither subtle nor new. The spiders aren’t the villains of this episode so much as the victims of the one the script actually wants to talk about. The episode has a monster in the building and keeps cutting away from it to have an argument.
And the ending is a genuine misfire. Robertson shoots the giant mother spider, which is already suffocating to death, and the Doctor is appalled by his cruelty. Her alternative was to lock every spider in a room to starve slowly. That’s not obviously the more merciful option, and the episode doesn’t notice. It wants a clean moral contrast between the compassionate Doctor and the trigger-happy businessman, and it hasn’t set one up. He then walks away with no consequences whatsoever, presumably because a sequel was planned.
Compare and despair
The last scene is the one bit of season structure the run bothers with. All three companions choose to keep travelling, not because they’re trapped or curious, but because they’ve each looked at their actual lives in Sheffield and decided they want something else. Ryan’s speech about his mum, Graham’s admission that he can’t be in that house, Yaz’s flat refusal to go back to parking disputes. It’s a small, well-judged scene that does what a fourth episode should. It also underlines the problem, because the show is far better at these four people than at anything it puts in front of them. Four episodes in, the pattern is set and I don’t much like it. Every story so far has a social theme, a functional monster, and a villain who exists to embody the theme. Nobody recurs. Nothing carries over except Grace’s absence. There’s no season arc and no returning threat, which would be fine if the standalone stories were strong, and they aren’t. They’re vehicles.
“Planet of the Spiders” is decades old, four times the length, and made for about the price of a modern catering budget. It is also considerably more frightening. The reason is commitment. The Eight Legs are absurd, wobbling about on visible wires, and the story treats them as an existential horror anyway: they get inside people’s heads, they colonise, they have a genuine hierarchy and a genuine plan. Nobody involved is embarrassed. The daftness becomes part of the dread. This episode has better spiders and less nerve. It keeps cutting away at the moment tension might build, plays several sequences for comedy, and never once puts a character in a situation you’d struggle to watch. The best horror moment is the webbed body in the bathtub, and the images themselves are strong; it just lasts about eight seconds before someone makes a joke. That’s the whole episode in miniature: a good idea, glanced at, then defused.
What it leaves behind is Graham in Grace’s house, Bradley Walsh alone in a kitchen hearing his wife, the best two minutes of the episode. It leaves Najia Khan, because Yaz finally gets a family and her mother is sharper than anyone in the plot. It leaves a hotel that goes unused, with empty corridors and no hunt sequence and no tension, a setting that does nothing. It leaves Robertson, a villain given more screen time than the monster, making points the episode has already made twice. And it leaves the fam choosing to stay, the only piece of deliberate season structure in the run, and a good scene.
Rating: 2/5. A monster episode that can’t be bothered with its monster. The domestic material is strong and the cast remain the best thing here, but the horror is limp, the hotel is squandered, and the ending picks a moral fight it hasn’t earned. The spiders deserved better and so did I. Giant spiders in a Sheffield hotel, and the episode wanted to talk about property development. Somewhere in that building there was a proper scary hour going begging.
There’s a version of this episode that’s the best thing the Whittaker era produced. It’s in here. You can see it clearly, running underneath a science fiction plot so weak that it keeps dragging the whole thing down to its level. “Rosa” takes the fam to Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, and asks them to make sure history happens. The historical half is careful, well acted and genuinely uncomfortable. The Doctor Who half is a man in a leather jacket stealing bus parts. Those two things do not belong in the same episode, and the join shows.
Montgomery works
Vinette Robinson is excellent as Rosa Parks, and the writing around her is the most disciplined in the season. She isn’t a saint or a symbol. She’s a tired seamstress with a job, a husband, and a history of organising that the episode bothers to mention, which is more than most dramatisations manage. The detail that she’d already been trained at Highlander Folk School, that this was planned work rather than a spontaneous moment of temper, is exactly the sort of thing television usually flattens out. The city itself is the strongest thing here. Ryan gets slapped within two minutes of arriving for handing a white woman her dropped glove. Yaz and Ryan can’t sit in the same cafe as Graham. The Doctor talks her way past a policeman by inventing a story, and the policeman’s menace is entirely casual, which makes it worse. There is remarkably little sugarcoating here for a teatime audience, and co-writer Malorie Blackman’s fingerprints are all over that.
The episode’s smartest choice is refusing to let the white characters drive it. Graham and the Doctor can move through Montgomery with relative freedom. Ryan and Yaz cannot, and the script keeps that distinction sharp rather than smoothing it over for plot convenience. Yaz gets classified as Mexican by a segregated diner and has to work out on the spot which rules apply to her, which is a specific and horrible detail most dramas wouldn’t think of. Tosin Cole is very good here. Ryan’s scene with Martin Luther King is handled lightly, the show resisting the urge to make it a Moment, and his fury at having to be careful in a way that Graham doesn’t is played as exhaustion rather than speeches. Blackman gives the sequence where Ryan and Yaz sit behind a bin and compare notes on what they each get called in 2018 Sheffield a quiet, unforced honesty, and that’s the best-written scene in the run. There’s a genuine idea underneath all of it: the companions who normally get to be tourists in history are the ones history is aimed at. When the episode stays with that, it’s excellent.
The villain is a man who hides bus parts
And then there’s Krasko. He’s a criminal from the far future, released from Stormcage with a neural restrictor that prevents him from killing. His plan to preserve segregation involves rerouting buses, disabling a bus, and persuading a driver to call in sick. This is a man with a vortex manipulator, and his scheme is logistics. Josh Bowman plays him as a blank. There’s no ideology, no menace and barely any dialogue. He exists because the format requires an antagonist, and the moment you notice that, the episode sags around him. The Doctor defeats him by having Ryan point a gun-shaped device at him and send him somewhere else. It takes about forty seconds. Compare that to what this show can do with a historical. The Fires of Pompeii had a genuine moral engine, an impossible choice with real cost. Here the science fiction and the history never touch. Remove Krasko entirely and you’d have a stronger hour.
The bigger issue is what the plot actually asks the fam to do. They have to make sure a bus is full so that Rosa Parks is asked to give up her seat, which means Graham has to sit on that bus and be part of the crowd whose presence forces the moment to happen. That’s a genuinely uncomfortable idea, and the episode is right to find it uncomfortable. But it also means our heroes spend the hour as bystanders to something they must not change, which drains the story of agency. The Doctor’s role is to stand still. Doctor Who is a show about a person who interferes, and an episode built on the premise that interfering is forbidden has to work very hard to generate drama. This one mostly generates waiting. Bradley Walsh sells the discomfort in Graham’s face better than the script sells the idea.
Where it loses me
The last five minutes are where I part company with the people who call this a classic. The moment itself is played well. Then the episode stops, and Krasko’s defeat is followed by a caption, a summary of what the boycott achieved, and Andra Day’s “Rise Up” over the closing sequence, complete with an asteroid named after Rosa Parks. The drama had already made the point. Then the episode makes it again, in case you missed it, and the difference between a story and a lesson is exactly that repetition. I don’t need a song telling me how to feel about a scene I’ve just watched three actors carry perfectly well on their own. That instinct, the reluctance to trust the audience with an idea, is the thing that runs through this whole season. When the writing is good it’s a small blemish. When the writing is weaker, and it often is, it’s all that’s left.
The episode this most invites comparison with is Vincent and the Doctor, and the comparison is not kind. That story also took a historical figure whose significance the audience already knew, and also had to deal with the fact that the Doctor cannot change the outcome. It solved the problem by making the emotional stakes personal rather than historical. Amy thinks she’s fixed something. She hasn’t. The gallery scene works because it’s about the limits of kindness, not about informing you that Van Gogh was important. “Rosa” never finds that angle. It assumes the historical weight will do the emotional work, and historical weight is not the same thing as drama. You end up watching characters wait respectfully for a famous event to occur on schedule. There’s also a strange absence at the centre. Rosa Parks is the title character and has perhaps fifteen minutes of screen time, most of it observed from a distance by people protecting her. The episode is more comfortable venerating her than writing her.
What it leaves behind is Vinette Robinson, a performance that refuses sainthood and plays a working woman with a plan, the best guest turn of the era. It leaves a city that means it, the slap and the cafe and the policeman, Montgomery rendered with real discomfort and no flinching. It leaves Ryan and Yaz behind the bin, two companions comparing 1955 with 2018 Sheffield, quietly, the best-written scene of the run. It leaves Krasko, a time criminal whose master plan is bus timetables, the weakest antagonist in a season full of them. And it leaves a caption and a song, because the moment lands and then the episode explains the moment, which is the tell.
Rating: 3/5. Half of this is the finest thing the Whittaker era made, and the other half is a man stealing engine parts. The historical material is careful and superbly played, and every time the science fiction intrudes it cheapens what’s around it. Worth watching for Robinson. Frustrating for everything bolted to her. A seamstress with a plan, a city that made its own rules, and a time traveller whose evil scheme was a bus rota. One of those three belonged in this story.
If you were to casually scroll through sci-fi forums or Twitter this week, you’d be forgiven for thinking Doctor Who Series 11 just parked the TARDIS right on top of everyone’s childhood memories. There is a thick, palpable smog of disappointment hovering over the fandom right now.
But as someone who has watched this cycle repeat itself for decades, I’m here to deliver a bit of nuance: the fandom is overreacting about the wrong things, but they aren’t entirely wrong to be frustrated.
The Thirteenth Doctor is Crushing It
Let’s get the most obvious grievance out of the way: we have a new Doctor, and yes, she is a woman. For a very vocal, very exhausting minority of the internet, this was enough to warrant a complete meltdown.
But if you actually watch the screen, Jodie Whittaker is an absolute revelation. She has stepped into the role with a vibrant, breathless energy. Strip away the new outfit and the redesigned sonic screwdriver, and the core of the Time Lord is fully present. She is fiercely brave, hopelessly inquisitive, and intensely empathetic.
So, it isn’t Jodie.
The Audio Upgrade
It also isn’t the production. The new theme tune is a masterstroke, ditching the “twiddly-diddly” orchestral arrangements for an eerie, bass-heavy thump that beautifully honors the 1963 original.
Even better, we’ve officially moved on from Murray Gold’s bombastic incidental music. For the first time in years, you can actually hear the actors delivering their dialogue without needing subtitles to cut through the brass section.
The Real Problem: Escapism vs. Education
So if the lead is great and the production is solid, where is the disconnect? Here is where the new creative team under Chris Chibnall actually did miss the boat: they forgot we are here for escapism.
Classic and modern Doctor Who has always possessed political undertones, but historically, those themes were cleverly disguised inside a rubber monster suit or a terrifying space anomaly. We tune in for the sci-fi/horror “monster of the week.” We want to be spooked, thrilled, and transported across time and space.
Series 11, however, feels heavy-handed. It leans a bit too far into being overtly woke and political, prioritizing a moral message and social reformation over sheer, unadulterated fun. We don’t want a lecture; we want a TARDIS adventure. Compare this to the Steven Moffat era. For all the complaints about Moffat’s tangled lore—like when he pushed the Time Lords to the brink in Hell Bent—he fundamentally understood the assignment. He consistently delivered absolute masterclasses in sci-fi suspense, like the brilliant ghost story Under the Lake. This season feels like it left the horror and the pure escapism back on Gallifrey.
But We Still Hate Change
Even with these valid critiques of the writing, we have to admit our own guilt: sci-fi fans paradoxically despise change.
We crave a predictable status quo in a show whose entire premise is about exploring the terrifying unknown. We lived through this exact tantrum when David Tennant left and Matt Smith reset the board in The Eleventh Hour. Then, the Smith loyalists grabbed their pitchforks the second Peter Capaldi showed up. (And let’s not forget the old-school Pertwee fans who flat-out refused to accept Tom Baker).
At least Whovians handle these transitions marginally better than Star Trek fans, who are currently furiously complaining that Star Trek: Discovery dares to not look like it was filmed on a cardboard soundstage in 1966.
The Silver Lining
Here is the ultimate takeaway: this soft reboot—even with its overly political leaning—is going to draw in an entirely new demographic of viewers who never felt compelled to watch before. They are going to stumble into the TARDIS and fall head-over-heels in love with Whittaker, experiencing the exact same magic many of us felt when Christopher Eccleston blasted back onto our screens in Season 1.
And you want to know the best part? In three or four years, when someone inevitably replaces Jodie Whittaker… this brand new generation of fans is going to absolutely hate them.
The second episode of a new era usually has one job: prove the first one wasn’t a fluke. “The Ghost Monument” instead proves something less encouraging. It shows you that this production team can build a genuinely beautiful piece of television and then forget to put a story inside it. It looks tremendous. South Africa doubles for the dead planet Desolation, all bleached rock and hard light, and after ten years of Cardiff quarries the sheer scale of it is a pleasure. Segun Akinola’s score finally gets some room. There are shots here as good as anything in the revived show. Nothing that happens in front of them matters.
The race that isn’t
The premise is a race. Two survivors of the Rally of the Twelve Galaxies, Angstrom and Epzo, are competing for a fortune, and the finish line is a structure that appears on Desolation once every thousand rotations. The Doctor and the fam get scooped up en route and tag along. A race needs urgency. This one has none. The two competitors stop racing almost immediately and spend the episode walking, which turns the whole structure into a countryside ramble with occasional briefing. Nobody overtakes anybody. There’s no clock you can feel. The prize is money, which is the least interesting thing anyone in Doctor Who has ever wanted. Susan Lynch and Shaun Dooley are both decent, and both are given exactly one character trait each. She’s looking for her family. He was taught not to trust anyone by a mother who left him on a mountain. They swap these facts, learn to work together, and share the prize. You can see the shape of it from the first scene.
The planet is the best thing in the episode, and the show keeps almost using it. Desolation was a weapons laboratory. The Stenza, briefly and usefully connected back to Tim Shaw, hired scientists to build here and then killed them and poisoned the world. There are killer robots patrolling the sand, sniper drones, and water full of microbes that eat flesh. That’s four separate genuinely good threats. Each one gets about three minutes. The robots are dispatched, the drones are dispatched, the water is crossed. Nothing escalates. The episode moves through its hazards like a checklist rather than building any of them into a real obstacle, and by the halfway mark you understand that none of these things are going to seriously trouble anybody. The Doctor’s line about the Stenza, that they conquer by making a world uninhabitable and then taking it, is the closest the season gets to building a recurring threat, and a rare thread back to The Woman Who Fell to Earth. It goes nowhere.
The Remnants and the clue
Then, briefly, the episode gets frightening. The Remnants are rags. Strips of cloth that hang in the dark, move like snakes, and speak. They read minds, and they use what they find, which is the one moment in the hour where something feels genuinely wrong rather than merely hazardous. Rachel Talalay would have done something extraordinary with them. What they say to the Doctor is the whole reason this episode gets discussed at all. They taunt her with something she’s buried: “the Timeless Child.” She has no idea what it means. For now it’s just two words in the dark, and as a hook it works.
The Doctor without her ship
There is one thread worth following, and it’s about faith. Thirteen spends the episode insisting the TARDIS will come. Not hoping. Insisting, past the point where the evidence supports it, to three people who have no reason to believe her and every reason to be furious that she brought them here. Whittaker plays the certainty as something closer to stubbornness than confidence, and when it briefly cracks, the crack is the best acting in the hour. Graham gets the sharpest material off the back of it. He’s the only one willing to say out loud that they might die out here because a stranger made a promise she can’t keep, and Bradley Walsh delivers it without rancour, which makes it land harder. Ryan’s response, emptying a rifle at a squad of robots because he learned to shoot on a games console and it doesn’t work, is a nice puncture of the action-hero instinct. The fam are still the reason to watch.
The ghost monument is the TARDIS, phasing in and out of reality, and the moment it finally solidifies is the emotional payoff the episode has been saving. The new interior is gorgeous: crystalline pillars, a hexagonal console with a slab of what looks like alien rock in it, biscuit dispenser included, and warm orange light rather than the cold blues of the Capaldi years. It feels lived in and slightly organic, and it’s the first design choice of the era that’s unambiguously an improvement. Whittaker’s delight at seeing her ship again is lovely. So is the custard cream gag. The last two minutes are the best two minutes.
The problem underneath
Here’s my real complaint, and it’s about the season more than the episode. Two episodes in, this show has decided it doesn’t do returning monsters and doesn’t do arc plots. What’s left has to be monster-of-the-week storytelling strong enough to stand alone, and “The Ghost Monument” is not that. It’s a travelogue with a moral about cooperation, and the moral arrives on schedule whether the story has earned it or not, which is the same complaint I’d end up making about Arachnids in the UK a fortnight later. You can strip out the aliens entirely and the episode still ends the same way, with two people learning to trust each other. When the science fiction is that removable, it isn’t really science fiction. It’s set dressing.
Worth flagging one small design decision that pays off across the season, though. The new sonic screwdriver, built in the forge last week, is deliberately limited. It scans, it analyses, it does some basic mechanical work, and it repeatedly cannot do the thing the plot needs. The Doctor complains about it. She has to improvise around it. After a decade of the sonic quietly becoming a magic wand that resolved any obstacle within reach, that’s a healthy correction, because removing a get-out-of-jail tool forces the writing to find actual solutions. The trouble is that this season doesn’t take advantage. Having stripped the Doctor of her easy answer, the scripts mostly replace it with a lot of talking rather than ingenuity. She still solves things quickly. She just explains more while doing it.
What it leaves behind is the best-looking episode of the era, South Africa and hard light and a proper sense of scale, because whatever else is wrong, the photography isn’t. It leaves a race with no racing, two competitors who stop competing in act one, chasing a prize made of money. It leaves four threats and none developed, robots and drones and poisoned water and killer rags, each getting three minutes and none of them escalating. It leaves the Remnants, genuinely unsettling for about four minutes and then gone, the one thing here I’d have wanted more of. And it leaves “the Timeless Child”, two words that will eventually be used to rewrite the Doctor’s entire origin, badly, which works as a hook and should never have been kept as a promise.
Rating: 2.5/5. Handsome, watchable and completely inert. The new TARDIS is a win and the Remnants are a flash of something better, but a race with no urgency and hazards with no escalation makes for an hour that evaporates on contact. The cast keep it afloat. Nothing else does. A dead planet, a walking race, and two words whispered by a rag in the dark. The ship came home, at least. That part I’ll take.
A new Doctor gets one job in their first episode: convince you, before the credits roll, that this is the same person in a different body. Jodie Whittaker does it in about ninety seconds, somewhere between falling through the roof of a moving train and cheerfully informing a carriage full of terrified strangers that she’s the one who’s going to sort this out.
She is immediately, obviously the Doctor. That was the thing everyone spent a year arguing about, and it turns out to have been the least interesting question in the room. She’s brilliant at it. After the long, elegiac goodbye of Twice Upon a Time, the change of gear is total.
The problem is everything built around her.
The Best Version of This Character in Years
Whittaker plays Thirteen as restless, delighted and slightly scattered, a person who thinks out loud because the thoughts arrive faster than the sentences. There’s a warmth to her that Capaldi deliberately withheld and that Smith turned into performance. This Doctor just likes people, straightforwardly, and is enormously pleased whenever one of them does something clever.
The forge sequence is the episode’s best idea. Stranded with no TARDIS and no sonic, she walks into a Sheffield metalworks and builds a new screwdriver out of scrap and Sheffield steel, narrating the whole thing like a woman assembling flat-pack furniture at two in the morning. It tells you what she is without a single line of exposition. Give her a workshop and a problem and she’ll improvise her way out.
Her speech about regeneration lands too. “We’re all capable of the most incredible change” is the sort of line that could be unbearable, and she underplays it into something almost casual.
The Fam
The three companions are the reason to keep watching, and it’s worth saying up front that all three work.
Bradley Walsh is the surprise. Graham O’Brien is a retired bus driver in remission from cancer, and Walsh plays him with an unfussy decency that the show hasn’t really had before. He’s frightened, he says so, and he keeps going anyway. Ryan Sinclair has dyspraxia, which the episode handles by showing him fail at a bike and then simply moving on rather than making a lesson of it. Tosin Cole underplays him nicely.
Yasmin Khan gets the least to do, which becomes a running problem across the season, but Mandip Gill makes a probationary copper who wants a bigger case feel like a real person with a real job.
Three companions is a lot. The TARDIS crew hasn’t been this crowded since 1982, and the episode is honest enough to let them get in each other’s way rather than pretending the arithmetic works.
Sheffield as a Character
One thing this era gets right from the first frame is place.
Previous showrunners treated Britain outside London as somewhere you visit for an episode. Chibnall is from the north and shoots Sheffield like somewhere people actually live: the tram, the ring road, the allotments, the back of a warehouse at three in the morning. Nobody explains the accents or apologises for them. It’s the most convincingly ordinary Britain the show has had since Rose Tyler’s estate.
That grounding matters more than it sounds, because it gives the fam somewhere to be from. Graham drove the buses. Ryan works in a warehouse and is trying to pass his driving test. Yaz is a probationary officer stuck on parking disputes. These are jobs, not backstory decoration, and the season keeps returning to them.
The direction lets the city breathe too. There’s a long take following Ryan up a hill with his bike that has no plot function at all and tells you everything about him.
The Villain Is a Man Who Collects Teeth
Here’s where it starts to wobble.
Tzim-Sha, which Ryan mishears as Tim Shaw and which the show then leans on as a joke for the rest of the season, is a Stenza warrior hunting a human as a trophy. He wears the teeth of his kills in his face. That’s a genuinely nasty visual and a decent hook for a villain.
He is also completely inert. He stomps about, he issues threats, he gets outsmarted by a woman with a homemade screwdriver, and at no point does he feel dangerous enough to justify the body count. The gathering coils, the DNA bomb, the whole apparatus of his hunt gets explained rather than dramatised. By the time he’s dealt with I’d stopped caring how.
This turns out to be the template for the season. The monster is a delivery mechanism for a theme, not a threat in its own right.
Grace
And then the episode does the one thing that genuinely sticks.
Grace O’Brien is the best character in the episode. She’s fearless, funny, entirely unbothered by aliens, and she dies climbing a crane to stop the coils, because she couldn’t leave it alone. It’s a real death, played straight, and the show doesn’t reverse it or soften it.
Everything good about the next ten episodes runs off that funeral. Graham’s grief is the only sustained emotional thread the season commits to, and Ryan’s slow, grudging acceptance of him is the only relationship that visibly changes over thirteen weeks. Sharon D. Clarke is in about twenty minutes of television and casts a shadow across the whole run.
The four of them standing in a field at the end, accidentally teleported into deep space, is a good closing image. Whittaker’s “come on then” is exactly right.
What It Gets Wrong
The direction is oddly flat for a debut. Everything is shot handheld and slightly grey, the Sheffield locations are used well but lit like a soap, and the new score by Segun Akinola is so understated it occasionally vanishes. After a decade of Murray Gold hammering every emotional beat, restraint is welcome. This is a bit further than restraint.
There’s also no hook. No crack in the wall, no impossible girl, no bad wolf. Chibnall has clearly decided the season-long mystery box is a Moffat habit worth breaking, which is a defensible call, and then puts nothing in its place. The episode ends and there’s nothing pulling you to next week except goodwill toward the cast.
No Title Sequence, No Theme
A small oddity worth recording: this episode has no opening titles.
It runs the cold open and then goes straight into the story, saving the new title sequence and Akinola’s arrangement of the theme for the end. It’s a confident choice and it works, treating the debut as an event rather than an episode.
The new sequence, when it arrives, is the best in the revived era. It drops the time vortex tunnel that every version since 2005 has used and goes back to the swirling, abstract, faintly unsettling patterns of the classic titles. The theme arrangement is sparse and percussive, closer to the Delia Derbyshire original than to anything from the Gold years.
Both are signals of intent. This production wants to look and sound different from what came before. It largely succeeds at that, and then struggles to find stories worth the new clothes.
What The Woman Who Fell to Earth Leaves Us With
A superb Doctor in a merely adequate episode. Here’s what it plants:
- Whittaker is the real thing. Warm, quick, restless, unmistakably the Doctor. The casting argument was over before the first act finished.
- A sonic built in a forge. Character established through craft rather than speech. The single best sequence in the episode.
- The fam. Three companions who all work, which is harder than it sounds, with Bradley Walsh quietly the best actor in the cast.
- Grace dies. The one loss the season actually commits to, and the engine for everything Graham does afterwards.
- A villain who isn’t one. Tim Shaw looks superb and does nothing. First sign of a season that cares more about what a story means than whether it works.
Rating: 3.5/5 — A strong introduction to a Doctor I liked immediately, wrapped around a plot with no urgency and an antagonist who never earns his teeth. The cast is the asset here. The storytelling is already showing the flaw that defines the run.
She fell through a train roof, built a screwdriver out of scrap, and lost someone on the way. Good start on the person. Now do something with her.
I knew Venom from the old Spider-Man comics long before Sony gave him his own movie, back when he was just a black suit that made Peter meaner before anyone bothered explaining where it came from. So this Venom review comes with a built-in comparison point, and it’s not a flattering one for Sony’s first attempt at the character. Topher Grace got maybe fifteen minutes of screen time in Spider-Man 3 and had to play a Wall Street guy who suddenly turns evil for reasons nobody in that script cared to sell. There was never a version of that performance that was going to land. Put Tom Hardy in the suit with a script that actually knows what to do with him, and the gap between the two isn’t close. It’s not even the same category of movie.
What Sony got right this time is treating the bonding as the whole point instead of a plot mechanic to get through on the way to the real story. Eddie Brock is a wrecked investigative journalist by the time the symbiote finds him. Fired, dumped, living in a motel with nothing left to lose. The film hands most of its runtime to a creature living in his head that talks back, insults him, and eats live lobsters out of a restaurant tank. That’s the movie, and I mean that as a compliment. Not the Life Foundation conspiracy. Not Riot. Not the finale. Eddie arguing with a parasite that thinks he’s a loser and slowly deciding it likes him anyway.
Hardy’s doing something nobody else in this genre attempts
Watching Hardy play both halves of that relationship is the reason to see this at all. He’s doing full physical comedy as a man having a public breakdown in one register, then doing a second, meaner performance as the voice telling him he’s pathetic in another, and somehow keeping both readable as the same person. Eddie’s decline plays out almost entirely on Hardy’s face and posture before Venom ever gets a line, which is a harder job than the marketing for this thing ever gave him credit for.
I’d love to have seen Spider-Man in this movie. He’s always been my favorite, and a Spider-Man villain film with the actual hero physically absent from the whole picture is a genuinely strange thing to release. Sony owns his supporting cast and not him, and instead of hiding that gap they built a movie around it. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet here we are.
Michelle Williams gets criminally little to do as Anne Weying for most of the runtime, stuck playing the ex-fiancée who watches Eddie fall apart from the outside. Then the film gives her thirty seconds with the symbiote herself, late on, and it’s the single funniest thing in the movie. It’s a small moment and it shouldn’t work either, but it’s proof the bonding idea is strong enough to carry a scene even when it isn’t the main event.
Riot and Carlton Drake are the part of the film everyone correctly complains about. Two CGI blobs crashing into each other through a chaotic third act, the same problem the first Iron Man had a decade earlier and somehow still hasn’t solved. I don’t disagree with any of that criticism. I just don’t think it matters much next to what Hardy’s doing in every scene that isn’t the finale, because the finale is easily the least interesting thing happening on screen.
The R-rated argument, and why it isn’t going away
Every review of this thing points at the PG-13 rating like it’s the whole problem, and I think they’re onto something real. Deadpool proved an R-rated comic book movie could make serious money, and Venom is a character built for exactly that kind of nastiness. The lobster tank scene. The head-eating at the end. A monster that talks like it wants to kill you and, on more than one occasion, actually does. An R rating wouldn’t have fixed Riot or the CGI-collision problem. What it would have done is let the Eddie-and-Venom material go all the way instead of stopping just short, and that’s the part of this movie I actually wanted more of.
That said, the film gets a lot of mileage out of playing that relationship as comedy rather than horror, and the way it handles Eddie’s spiral into what looks from the outside like full-blown insanity is genuinely well done. Nobody around him reads what’s happening as anything but a man falling apart: not his ex, not the doctors, not the guy at the motel who has to deal with him at his worst. The movie lets that read sit uncomfortably next to what the audience already knows is happening inside his head. That’s a harder trick to land than the CGI-monster stuff usually gets credit for.
An origin movie that still has its own story to tell
Every complaint about this being an intro movie for a bigger franchise is fair, and I still think it earns its own two hours on its own terms. It isn’t just table-setting for a sequel that hadn’t been greenlit yet. Eddie’s decline, the bonding, the odd-couple stretch through the middle, the choice Venom makes at the end to stay loyal to a guy it started out despising: that’s a complete arc, whatever else gets stacked around it for future installments. A lot of comic book movies from this stretch of the decade can’t say the same about themselves. This one earns the ending it gets rather than just pointing at whatever comes next.
I’m giving this one a four out of five. It’s a genuinely strong watch, and for a film whose entire job is introducing a character and setting up whatever the studio has planned next, it had more of its own story than it strictly needed. Sony had this character on screen once already and wasted him in fifteen minutes of somebody else’s movie. This time he got the actor and the script he always deserved, and there’s no equating the two results.
The stinger at the end has Eddie interviewing a prisoner named Cletus Kasady, played by Woody Harrelson in a truly unsubtle red wig, and it’s the one moment where I’m actively curious what Sony’s building toward next. As of right now I have no idea where any of that goes. Worth remembering too: this whole universe is running six months after Infinity War wiped out half of existence and about a year after Homecoming put Peter Parker back on screen in the first place, and Venom never once acknowledges either franchise. That’s either a strange gap in an otherwise connected pop-culture moment or the most honest thing about the whole project. This universe exists because Sony still owns the characters orbiting Spider-Man, and none of them get to say his name out loud.
Unlike the previous installment this story has much more action. Aiden has assumed the identity of a Freeborn warrior, named Jorge. Freeborn warriors, unlike the genetically engineered Trueborn, are born naturally from loving parents, instead of being born from an artificial womb.
The book opens on the planet Glory with Base Commander Kael Pershaw in a discussion with his personal aide. Unaware of Aiden’s false identity, he is disgusted upon learning that he had easily defeated a Trueborn warrior in a brawl. The Commander despises the Freebirth under his command. After another fight results in the death of a Trueborn warrior, Kael Pershaw punishes Aiden by forcing him to wear the Dark Band of Shame. In spite of the punishment, Aiden’s unit are selected to carry out a rescue mission. Him and his squad deploy their battlemechs into a region known as Blood Swamp.
After locating the stranded warriors and their crashed mechs, their combined forces plan for an attack on a unit from a rival clan. The Trueborn warriors, having no experience piloting mechs through swamps, are humiliated that a Freeborn will command the operation, which ultimately ends in victory. So great was the victory, that the Trueborn warriors are entitled to compete for a Bloodname title, something only Trueborn are entitled to obtain.
Aiden, secretly a Trueborn warrior, interrupts the Bloodname ritual and reveals his true origin, demanding the right to compete. Kael Pershaw, compelled by a witness, sends the conspirators back to planet Ironhold to stand before the Grand Council where a decision will be made on the matter. Falconer Commander Ter Roshak is summoned to testify for his role in giving Aiden a false identity. Ter Roshak testifies that he was convinced that Aiden is the reincarnation of his former Commander, Ramon Mattlov.
Ter Roshak and Aiden’s defence is overruled, both men reject the decision and demand a Trial of Refusal, the right of any Jade Falcon warrior to contest a judgement by going into combat against some of the clan’s best warriors. The votes of the trial decide the odds of three to one against the accused. With the odds stacked against them, only cruel violent fate can reverse the decision.
Another highly recommended title, especially for fans of action driven stories. I encourage you to read it yourself and discover how the subsequent clan battles turn out.
Taking place on the planet Ironhold, this series begins with fresh recruits to the Jade Falcon military clan. The youthful hopefuls were bred through scientific methods meant to make genetically superior warriors. They’re known as Trueborn. The story follows Aidan, a Trueborn recruit and his group of trainees as they advance through the path to becoming Mechwarriors. Unfortunately for Aidan, his instructor is the demanding and cruel Falconer Joanna who takes an immediate dislike to him and takes delight in making his training as unpleasant as possible. As the trainees progress, inferior recruits are flushed out of the training program, pitting them against each other.
The Jade Phoenix clan is portrayed as being relentlessly aggressive in even the most relaxed moments. Major disagreements within the clan are settled in the ‘Circle of Equals’ where warriors would fight to decide an outcome. This book doesn’t have as much action as other Battletech titles, focusing more on clan attitudes and procedures and Aidan’s experience as he goes through clan training.
After training is complete, the remaining recruits face the six ritual combat trials. Succeeding will grant the trainees a position within the clan. During the Trial of Position, Aiden uses bold and risky tactics which almost pays off – actions similar to those portrayed in the first Gray Death Legion book to be frank – but his battle mech is disabled at the crucial moment, ending his chance of joining the clan. He is flushed out of Mechwarrior training and begins a new career path, but it won’t be long before destiny brings him back into the cockpit of a battlemech.
Overall, I wish I started reading Battletech much sooner. I can’t recommend it enough. There is a great blend of technology, action and clan culture. The book also has some artwork tucked into the pages, a glossary of terms used and schematic drawings for each battlmech type. If you like action, science fiction, or just a great story, you can’t go wrong.
This book is a great introduction to the “Clans” but if you’re interested in reading details about the Inner Sphere or want a bit more history of the Battletech Universe as a whole you should check out Scribd.
As mentioned in previous posts, Scribd has an excellent selection of Battletech novels. However they are somewhat out of sequence as I’ve discussed earlier and this book is considered #2 in the Legends imprint. This simply wouldn’t make any sense so I strongly urge you to read Decision at Thunder Rift by William H. Keith Jr. first.
I have been sitting with this movie for three weeks and I still don’t fully believe they did it. Ten years of buildup, eighteen films of heroes reliably saving the day, and Marvel ended the nineteenth by letting the villain win. Not a moral victory. Not a heroic setback before the comeback. An actual loss, half of everyone you love turned to dust, the bad guy watching a sunrise, satisfied. Nobody does this. You do not spend a decade earning an audience’s trust and then cash it in for a gut punch. They did, and it’s the gutsiest thing this studio has ever put on a screen.
It’s Thanos’s movie, and that’s the trick
Here’s what I don’t think enough people are saying yet. The Russo brothers built this as Thanos’s story. He’s the protagonist. The arc is his, the losses are his, the goal that drives every scene is his. The Avengers are the obstacles. Flip the camera around and this is a film about a man on a quest to complete a terrible task, and the heroes are the monsters standing between him and the finish line.
That is exactly why he works where Ultron so badly didn’t. Ultron was a world-ending intelligence written like a sidekick, all quips, no menace. Thanos is a genocidal warlord written like a lead, given weight and conviction and a warped internal logic he never breaks for a cheap laugh. Josh Brolin plays him tired and sad and certain, a true believer rather than a cackling maniac. When he sacrifices Gamora on Vormir and the movie actually makes you feel what it costs him, you understand you’re watching something new for these films: a villain the movie takes as seriously as its heroes. I wrote a while back about how Thanos’s whole deal had been hiding in plain sight for years, and this finally pays that patience off.
The overstuffed roster somehow sings
On paper this should be chaos. Every hero from a decade of movies, three or four storylines running in parallel across the galaxy, dozens of characters who all need a beat. It could have been the switchboard problem all over again, all connective tissue and no story.
It isn’t, because the Russos found the move: pair people who’ve never shared a frame and let the friction carry it. Thor crash-landing into the Guardians. Tony and Doctor Strange and a teenage Spider-Man, three of the biggest egos in the universe stuck on the same ship, sniping the whole way. The loose comic energy of Star-Lord’s crew smashing into the buttoned-up Avengers. These combinations are the film’s real fuel, and they land precisely because the solo movies did the character work first. You’ve spent years with these people. The reward is watching them collide.
The tone control is remarkable too. It’s funny right up until it needs to stop, and then it stops on a dime. That’s the balance Age of Ultron fumbled by letting the jokes seep into everything, the villain included. Here the humor knows its place, so when the last twenty minutes go quiet and cruel, the shift genuinely hurts. The lightness of the first film is still in the DNA, but it’s been given a floor to fall through.
The ending broke the contract on purpose
Let’s talk about the snap, because it’s the whole point. Marvel spent ten years training you to expect the win. Heroes struggle, heroes rally, heroes prevail, roll credits, tease the next one. This movie uses every ounce of that training against you. You keep waiting for the reversal, the last-second save, the trick. It never comes. Strange gives up the Time Stone. Thanos wins. And then the dusting starts, and it doesn’t stop with a redshirt. It takes Spider-Man, Black Panther, half the Guardians, the characters you just spent years bonding with, and the theater I was in went dead silent.
Do I think it sticks? Of course not. There’s a fourth Avengers movie coming next year, half these “dead” heroes have sequels announced, and everyone in that room knew it walking out. But the film commits so totally to the moment that the meta-knowledge doesn’t matter while you’re in it. That’s the achievement. It made an ending everyone knows is temporary land like a permanent loss, and it did it by respecting the audience enough to actually go through with the horrible thing.
The catch, because I owe you honesty
This is half a movie, and it was never pretending otherwise. It ends on a cliffhanger and asks us to wait a year for the resolution, which means it can’t be judged whole on its own. Some of the enormous cast gets shortchanged; a few heroes are basically along for the ride. And the Wakanda battle is the least interesting stretch, another field full of faceless CG creatures, the one place the film slides back into the drone-army habit its predecessors leaned on.
The whole thing also only fully works if Avengers 4 sticks the landing, and I have to trust that on faith right now. As a standalone, this is a brilliant, brutal first act with no second half yet attached.
Where it lands
Best of the Avengers movies, and it’s not close, though I reserve the right to change my mind once we see how this story actually ends. It clears the original on ambition and buries Ultron on every axis that matters. The lesson Ultron flunked is the one this movie aces: give your villain real weight and the whole thing has a spine. The critics have come around hard, the box office is rewriting the record books, and the character everyone’s still talking about three weeks later is the one who won.
Now we wait a year to find out what it cost. I’ve never been so annoyed to be left hanging, or so sure the wait will be worth it.
Having lived in Africa for quite a few years, I was a bit torn with this film. Overall it was an enjoyable experience, but it wasn’t perfect in my opinion and while its popularity cannot be denied, there were definitely issues with it in my opinion. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) really showed their creative genius with the backstory of Wakanda, a mythical nationalist African state ruled by a monarch. King T’Challa, played by Chadwick Boseman, holds the Black Panther title, a role he had trained for since childhood. He rules supreme over Wakanda, a walled and isolated country which is the sole possessor of Vibranium. Black Panther is challenged by Erik Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan, his cousin and eligible heir who disputes the country’s isolationist policies. The movie is action packed with awesome sci-fi tech and weapons although the humor is a bit forced and doesn’t blend in as well as in other Marvel movies.
Nationalist theme and cultural identity
For centuries, Wakanda has been closed off from the rest of the world as it is fully walled off, doesn’t accept immigrants or refugees, has stayed uncolonized and is completely composed of black Wakandan citizens. Vibranium is a revolutionary technology harvested from a meteorite and is used in making weapons and armored vehicles, but the Wakandans aren’t sharing it with other countries.
The film also has a huge presence of black people and women who are usually supporting characters in other Marvel superhero movies. Black Panther has set off the alt-right group who are using it as the latest example of how Hollywood is trying to force SJW agendas down their throats. Leftists, on the other hand, are elated about how the movie embraces diversity, African-American pride, and blabber on about how Wakanda is the epitome of a fully-fledged Trump-style administration. Basically, it has all the ingredients needed to spark a national debate and generate hype for a long time to come. In fact, it is already the all-time most talked about movie on Twitter. But see, that’s where I have some issues. I’ve lived in Zambia and Zimbabwe and the portrayal of Africans as monolithic is something I can’t really get behind. They talk about and show other African nations as poor and downtrodden (and they are) but they have some decent cities and South Africa especially has cities on par with anything in the Western World.
Storyline and writing
First off, this is the first Marvel movie in ten years to feature a non-white male lead actor. It is a good sign of things to come, and we can expect more of this from Marvel. Secondly, Wakanda represents a powerful nation with a rich African heritage that is untouched by Western influence.
The director, Ryan Coogler, gives King T’Challa an African accent and N’Jadaka/ Killmonger is given an American accent to show the animosity between Black-Americans and Africans. It is interesting how local conversations are done in Xhosa, a South African dialect, yet Wakanda is located somewhere between the D.R.C and East African countries. Kiswahili, Kikongo or Lingala would have played right into the geographical position.
** SPOILERS **
Upon King T’Chaka’s death, T’Challa returns home to claim the throne and pulls out his ex-lover Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) from an undercover operation to attend his coronation ceremony. Nakia’s mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and T’Challa’s younger sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) are also in attendance. Erik Stevens and Klaue steal a Wakandan aircraft from a London museum, and W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya) who is T’Challa’s best friend and Okoye’s (Danai Gurira) lover convinces the king to take revenge. Later on, King T’Challa is challenged by M’Baku (Winston Duke), leader of the Jabari tribe, to customary hand-to-hand combat for the crown. M’Baku is defeated, but his life is spared; he repays this gesture by providing refuge for Shuri, Ramonda and healing T’Challa when he was fatally injured.
** SPOILERS **
Missing the mark?
The main antagonist, N’Jadaka, who is opposed to Wakanda’s customs, is willing to share Vibranium with outside forces including Ulysses Klaue. Ryan Coogler, however, missed the mark when he portrayed him as a pro-imperialist character who signs up for the U.S. Special Forces to fight in the Middle East. Although this is explained as N’Jadaka’s strategy to get combat training and challenge the Black Panther, it just doesn’t cut it. Killmonger comes off as a tragic hero and a victim rather than a ruthless and scary villain. To give him credit though, he plays the part well; a villain who has a personal agenda against the hero and not some crazy world domination scheme like Bond villains.
Pitting a black superhero against his kin (literally) dismisses the rhetoric of black-good, white-bad that was expected by most. There is also the issue of Marvel’s ambiguity about the capabilities of Vibranium which according to them can be used to create almost everything. Forest Whitaker (Zuri) dies too soon without establishing any real connection with the audience or even King T’Challa for that matter. Additionally, not much was shown about the Wakandan’s way of life or where they stand amidst the conflict since most of the film focuses on the main characters. Coogler really missed the mark with the whole “American colonialists” thing since the U.S. was never a colonial power.
Acting and screenplay
We had previously been introduced to the Black Panther and Wakanda from Captain America: Civil War when he seeks revenge against the orchestrators of the bombing that killed his father. This is good since the story is familiar and interconnected with other events on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). As previously highlighted, Coogler needed the Black Panther to have an African accent to bring out the African roots and background. Chadwick Boseman does his best on the accent, but it removes emphasis on some lines and doesn’t deliver them effectively. Killmonger is also more intimidating when quiet than when speaking since his lines are not well written and don’t pack any punch. It is a little underwhelming especially considering Jordan’s prowess in earlier films like “The Wire”.
There is a considerable amount of hand-to-hand combat, and the action scenes are on point. The movie is chock full of CGI and special effects which has sci-fi fans going bananas. However, Marvel is flogging a dead horse with their good-guy-in-suit vs. bad-guy-in-identical-suit fight which is almost the fifth time we are seeing it from MCU.
Shuri is excellent in combat, and her sword-wielding skills from The Shannara Chronicles are well used. We also get to see the Black Panther chase after cars and blow them up for the second time after the first time in Civil War. All in all, it is a gripping movie that is well laden with humor, action and emotional scenes to keep you on the edge of the seat for the whole screening. I’d give it an 8.5 out of 10 for the fusion of multiple concepts in a new type of superhero movie that we aren’t accustomed to.
It’s difficult to catch lightning in a bottle twice, and that’s exactly what James Gunn tries to do in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. The word “Marvel,” as in comic books or movie studios, has become a foundational term of our culture. Yet you could sit through almost every one of today’s comic-book movies and not find a whole lot to marvel at.
That’s where “Guardians of the Galaxy” came in. In an era of overstuffed, taped-together blockbusters, it was supremely funny, exciting, and well-made — a rock ‘n’ roll space opera, spectacular yet lithe, without a stray shot or sequence out of place, and with a wildly caustic yet devotional interplay among its motley crew of renegades that recalled the original 1977 “Star Wars” (obviously its chief influence). The film wielded the machinery of big-budget franchise filmmaking and trumped it at the same time. So the question of what “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” can do for an encore isn’t really, “Can it top the first film?” It’s more like, “Can it be as good?”
It’s the same combination of cartoony action and intergalactic screwball with some ambient production design recalling the photorealist sci-fi imagery of Roger Dean or Chris Foss in a bygone age, creating a visual sense of earnestness to offset the archly retro pop culture gags. Again, it has its own supercharged Heart FM playlist of 70s and 80s music. The early 70s track Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) by Looking Glass is laid on the soundtrack almost ecstatically in the opening sequence, and some tongue-in-cheek dialogue later invokes it as the greatest piece of music ever to have emerged from Planet Earth. This film rattles along and there’s a lot to enjoy.
The old gang are still together: as well as Quill, there is the green-faced Gamora, played by Zoe Saldana, and the mighty, slab-like Drax, played by Dave Bautista. Vin Diesel provides the voice of Baby Groot, and Bradley Cooper voices the foxy, weaselly figure of Rocket; he is the louche and disreputable character whose job is to get the group into trouble.
The Guardians get into some serious trouble pinching some energy sources from a certain golden empress named Ayesha, very amusingly played by Elizabeth Debicki. She has a haughty, queenly manner and an air of frozen displeasure whenever one of her many courtiers make a mess of things: Debicki’s Ayesha would be a great returning character, and on the strength of this Debicki would be strong casting in any new film about Elizabeth I, stealing Cate Blanchett’s crown.
The ensuing cosmic affray brings Quill and the Guardians back into contact with Yondu (Michael Rooker), the hated freebooter who kidnapped Quill from Planet Earth when he was a child, and with Gamora’s fanatically driven and malevolent sister, Nebula, played by Karen Gillan. But most pointedly of all, there is a new character, worryingly named Ego, played by Kurt Russell, whose “prequel” relationship with Quill is signaled pretty clearly in the opening scene. There is something unsettling in his buttery tan and bouffant splendor as a digitized young man and in the gravitas of his facial hair in the present day: he is a character with no small opinion of himself.
There are, once again, some funny lines, very often given to Drax, who has a way of oversharing. Pom Clementieff is very entertaining in the role of Mantis, a helpmeet of Ego; she has the gift of being an empath, someone who can intuit how someone else is feeling by laying hands on them but is in every other fantastically naive and un-insightful about the way human beings behave.
Can Guardians of the Galaxy avoid the perils of the threequel?
Ego himself introduces some apparently huge Freudian issues to the film, which on paper would seem to take the film’s emotional impact up a notch or two. But they are dealt with insouciantly, even flippantly – far more so than in something like Star Wars or Superman. That’s in the keeping of course, with the distinctive comic flavor of this franchise, but the revelations about Quill’s background just zing and ping around with the same pinball-velocity as everything else in the film. It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.
Funny fact – Stan Lee
The Stan Lee cameo is a special part of every Marvel movie. Everyone always knows that it’s coming, and yet it’s always delightful to see the co-founder of the comic book company deliver a silly line or play in a funny scene. That being said, his appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is special. Not only does it turn out that Lee is working with The Watchers — beings who always keep an eye on the multiverse — but also that every single one of his cameos has him playing the same character, as opposed to different ones each time out. It’s a fantastic and funny moment in the blockbuster, but what makes it really fascinating is the implication that it may have worked for all Marvel films, not just those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.