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Resident Evil (2026) theatrical poster
MoviesSciFi

Resident Evil (2026): One Courier, One Very Long Night

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I’m giving Resident Evil 2026 a 4 out of 5, and I’ll say straight away that this one isn’t an action movie. It’s a horror movie, a proper one, and I’ve said before that horror isn’t really my thing. I gave it a chance anyway because of the time I’ve put into the series as a whole, from the first film all the way through The Final Chapter. It was funny, but boy was it scary. And gross. I mean properly gross, in a way none of the earlier ones were.

This is a complete restart that doesn’t connect to anything before it, and there’s no Alice in it at all. Bryan is a medical courier who takes a well-paid job driving a package to Raccoon City General Hospital, up in the Colorado mountains, on the night a lab accident starts turning the city into an outbreak zone. His girlfriend Michelle has just told him she’s pregnant and he isn’t handling it well, and she’s only ever a voice on the phone. The whole film follows him through a single night as he tries to make that delivery, and that limited scope is a big part of why it works.

From action to horror

After the gunfights and superpowers of the Alice films, and a reboot that went back to the games, this is a completely different animal. Bryan isn’t a soldier. He’s a courier with a medical case, hitting a pedestrian on the way in and getting deeper into trouble from there, and one infected creature on its own is scary enough when there’s nobody to help you. The infected get more grotesque as the night goes on, and later they merge into a huge, knotted mass of bodies that I couldn’t look at for long. That’s the gross part, and it was a lot.

It’s funny too, and I didn’t expect that. Bryan isn’t the kind of person who knows what he’s doing, so his reactions are panic, swearing and disbelief, and the jokes land in the gaps between the scares. It gave me a place to catch my breath before the next one. I couldn’t say the film ever lets you relax, but the humour makes the fear easier to take, and that’s a good trade for someone like me who isn’t a horror fan.

Bryan, the medical courier, standing in a snowy street with a medical case and a rifle
Bryan, the medical courier, standing in a snowy street with a medical case and a rifle

The people he meets (spoilers ahead)

Along the way Bryan meets a pair of Umbrella scientists, Carl and Paul, an Umbrella enforcer called Maxine, and a hospital receptionist named Andrea Vasquez. None of them are characters from the games, and none of them are heroes, which fits a film about an ordinary man in over his head. Austin Abrams plays Bryan as a flawed guy trying to do one good thing, and it gives him room to be funny and terrified at once. With no Chris, Jill or Leon to lean on, it’s just him and the night.

Spoilers from here. Bryan gets the package to the hospital, and the researchers need what he’s carrying to make a cure. But he’s been infected, and it takes over: mutated limbs burst out of him and kill the scientists as National Guard helicopters arrive. It’s a bleak ending, with no rescue. I’m not sure whether there’s a part two in the works, but with how well it’s doing in the theatres I’d be surprised if they don’t roll out another one quickly.

Rating: 4 out of 5. It’s funnier than I expected, scarier than I’d hoped, and grosser than I can properly describe, and it’s a horror movie first. I gave it a 4 even though I’m not a big horror fan. And if there is a sequel, I’m guessing I’ll have a new protagonist to cheer for.

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the well
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Well: Something Is Standing Right Behind Her

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Long after a shuttle got stranded on a planet nobody could name, a squad of soldiers lands on a dead mining colony there and finds one survivor who insists she’s alone. She isn’t. There’s something standing directly behind her, always, in the one place nobody can look without getting close enough to die. “The Well” is a direct sequel to Midnight, which is the best thing this programme has ever made, and the enormous surprise is that it comes close.

I really enjoyed this. It’s the best episode of the Gatwa era and one of the strongest things the show has done since the revival. It’s also the episode that best justifies this era existing. Two series of enormous budgets and cartoon gods, and the standout is a horror story in a dark corridor built on one rule and two good performances.

The rule is superb

A sequel to Midnight is a terrible idea on paper, because the original works by refusing to explain anything. What this does instead is take the one thing we know, that the entity attaches itself to a person, and build an entirely new rule from it. The creature stands right behind Aliss at all times. Looking at her from the front is safe, but looking from behind means you’re looking at it, and it takes you. That single constraint governs the whole episode, so every scene becomes a problem of angles, of where people are standing and who can safely approach from where.

It’s also brilliantly cheap, in the way the best horror usually is. The monster is a space behind a woman, so there’s nothing to render and nothing that can look silly, and the tension comes entirely from where people stand and where they look. The colony is all corridors, work lights and a lot of dark, and it turns out the show is still at its best in a corridor with a torch. The soldiers’ scanners report one person in the room when there are obviously two things present, which tells me whatever is behind her doesn’t count as alive. Nobody explains what that means, and it gets worse the longer I think about it.

The Doctor, Belinda and Aliss in The Well

Aliss, and a properly frightening situation

Rose Ayling-Ellis is extraordinary as Aliss. She’s deaf, and the story uses that as a practical fact with practical consequences: she can’t hear what’s behind her, she reads faces, and she notices people backing away before she notices why. Nobody makes a speech about it. The scene where the soldiers work out the rule and start retreating from her, and she can see them go and doesn’t understand, is genuinely upsetting. She’s been alone for a long time and is desperate for company, and Ayling-Ellis plays the loneliness first and the fear second, which is the right order.

The soldiers are drawn quickly and killed without ceremony. There’s no plot armour here: the episode sets a rule, and then people break it and die, one after another, exactly as the rule says they will. After a run of episodes where consequences kept being waived, a story that kills people according to its own logic is enormously welcome. Nothing about this hour is waiting for a finale to explain it, either. After two years of mystery boxes, the relief of watching something that simply happens is considerable.

The Doctor is frightened, and says so

This is Gatwa’s best work in the run. The Doctor recognises where he is well before he admits it, and the moment he says the planet’s name out loud and can’t finish the sentence is continuity used for character instead of fan service. He’s scared in a way this Doctor hasn’t been. He tells Belinda he’s met this thing before, that he never found out what it was, and that last time it got someone and he couldn’t stop it. That’s an admission of an old failure, and it gives the episode a weight that has nothing to do with the plot.

The choice to have him lose again is the bravest thing in it. The creature isn’t beaten or understood, and the Doctor leaves with the thing still out there. The sequel also declines to explain the creature, which is the most important decision in the episode. It could easily have filled in an origin, a name or a motive, and it takes real restraint to give none of them. A monster that stays unexplained after two encounters is far worse than one with a backstory, and it’s the opposite of this era’s habit of sorting everything into a pantheon with a grievance.

Rating: 4/5. Really enjoyed this. It’s tense, cleanly built and genuinely frightening, with a monster made out of geometry instead of money and an outstanding guest performance from Rose Ayling-Ellis. It follows the best episode this show has ever made and doesn’t embarrass itself, which is about the highest compliment available. Only the slightly rushed final act keeps it from going higher.

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wild blue yonder
Doctor WhoTelevision

Wild Blue Yonder: Two People, One Ship, Nothing Else Out There

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The middle anniversary special was kept secret before broadcast, and now I understand why. There’s nothing to spoil except the fact that it’s very good. No returning monster, no cameo, no continuity fireworks, just two actors, one enormous empty spaceship and something out there copying them. I loved it, and it’s easily the best thing the show has done since the Capaldi years.

The setup is stripped to nothing. The TARDIS dumps the Doctor and Donna at the edge of the universe and then flees without them, leaving two people in a corridor with no exit and a robot slowly walking the length of the ship toward a self-destruct button. It opens on a broad gag with Isaac Newton and an apple, so I assumed I was in for a romp, and then the tone drops through the floor. After the first ten minutes there are no jokes that aren’t nervous ones. Everything that follows is character.

The Not-Things are a superb monster

Whatever is on this ship has never met life before, and it learns by copying. It starts with shape and gets it wrong, so the early glimpses are of arms that are too long and faces that don’t sit right, and the effects are restrained enough to be genuinely unpleasant instead of silly. Then it learns properly, and the horror shifts from body to identity. There are two Doctors and two Donnas, and neither the characters nor I can reliably tell which is which. The show plays entirely fair about it, too, because the tells are behavioural and you can spot them if you’re paying attention.

The reason it beats most duplicate stories is that the copies aren’t hostile at first, they’re curious. They want to understand what these creatures are and they’re prepared to ask questions to find out, which turns the middle act into a run of conversations where the wrong answer gets somebody killed. Tennant and Tate play four parts between them with almost nothing but posture and timing to tell them apart. Tate deserves as much credit as Tennant and gets less because the showier scene is his. She makes the copy of Donna slightly too helpful and slightly too keen to agree, and when the truth comes out you can go back and see exactly where you should have noticed.

The Doctor and Donna aboard the empty ship in Wild Blue Yonder

What the copies learn

The best idea in the special is what the Not-Things do with what they learn. To copy someone properly you have to know them, so they read the originals, and everything the Doctor and Donna say to each other becomes something the copies can use. That gives the one quiet confession in the hour a horrible edge. The Doctor finally tells Donna what’s happened since she last saw him: that he isn’t who he thought he was, that half the universe was lost to the Flux, and that he’s been carrying all of it alone. Tennant plays it as a man saying it out loud for the first time, and then the show reminds me that something else was listening.

It matters that this lands in the anniversary run. Sixty years of a character who talks constantly and gives away almost nothing, and the special’s answer to “who is this person” is a tired man admitting how frightened he is, with a copy of himself standing in the dark taking notes. That’s a far more interesting way to mark the occasion than a montage of old faces, and it costs nothing but two actors and a good script. Donna gets her moments too, quieter and just as sharp, about her family and the years she spent not knowing what she’d lost. The special uses horror as a way into character rather than as decoration, and that’s the difference between this and most bottle episodes.

Underneath, this is the same trick as Midnight. Confine the Doctor, take away his tools, and let something use his own words against him. That’s still the most reliable way to frighten me with this character, and it’s good to see the show remember it. Midnight did it with a stranger’s voice and this does it with his own face, which is a nasty little escalation.

Small, and shot like a film

The ship is vast, white and almost featureless, and the camera uses the emptiness properly, holding wide shots long enough that I started scanning the frame for something that shouldn’t be there. The sound does most of the rest. It’s also a good bit of design thinking: a single enormous vessel built to carry something dangerous away from everything else, with a self-destruct that takes years because nobody was in a hurry. All of that comes through the architecture instead of a briefing, and you work out what this place is for just by looking at it. There’s a lovely lull in the middle where the two of them sit and talk about nothing much, the sort of scene the show almost never has room for.

What strikes me most is the restraint. This was the middle special of a 60th anniversary, the point where the show could easily have wheeled out returning monsters, old faces and a multi-Doctor sequence. It does none of that, and spends its anniversary hour on two people in an empty room being frightened of each other. The Daleks would have made this worse, and a cameo would have broken the spell. The ending is the one wobble, wrapped up a little too neatly after everything before it, and Bernard Cribbins appearing in the last minute is genuinely moving but belongs to a different episode.

Rating: 4.5/5. Loved this. Two actors, one set and the most frightening hour the show has managed in years, built entirely out of performance and restraint. The confession scene is a career-best moment for Tennant, the monster is a properly good idea, and it proves the anniversary didn’t need a single cameo. Only the slightly tidy resolution keeps it off a five.

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Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City theatrical poster
MoviesSciFi

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021): Two Games, One Long Night

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I’m giving Welcome to Raccoon City a 3.5 out of 5. It felt to me like there was too much happening on screen, and I also missed Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, who I thought was really badass. This is a full reboot, so she isn’t in it, and neither is anything else from the earlier films. It goes back to the source instead and sets everything in 1998, in a Raccoon City that’s a dying company town with Umbrella packing up to leave. I went in curious to see how a version that sticks to the games would feel, and the answer is a bit mixed.

The reason it feels so full is that it takes the first two games and stuffs them into a single night. Claire Redfield hitchhikes back into town to warn her brother Chris that Umbrella is poisoning the place, because there’s something wrong with the water. Chris is in S.T.A.R.S., the police special unit, and Leon S. Kennedy is a rookie who’s just started his first night at the police station. That’s already a lot of characters to keep track of, and the film keeps adding.

The mansion and the station

Chris, Jill Valentine and Albert Wesker head out to the Spencer Mansion to find their missing Bravo team, which is the first game. Meanwhile Claire and Leon are holding the Raccoon City police station as the town falls apart around them, which is the second. It cuts between the two, and the mansion scenes recreate specific moments from the game: the first zombie turning its head, the piano, the dogs coming through the windows. If you’ve played it, those are fun to spot, and it’s clear the people who made it love the source.

The trouble is that each half could easily be a film on its own. The mansion has its own creepy, slow buildup in the game, and the station has its own siege, and squeezing both into under two hours means neither gets enough room. It starts small and ominous and then piles on the carnage, and by the second half there’s so much going on that I found it hard to keep track of what mattered. That’s where the too much on screen feeling comes from for me.

The group creeping through the candle-lit Spencer Mansion
The group creeping through the candle-lit Spencer Mansion

Villains, the cast and missing Alice

Wesker is selling out his own team to Umbrella for their research. Dr. William Birkin injects himself with the G-virus and mutates into a monster, and a disfigured test subject from the mansion’s past called Lisa Trevor turns out to be on Claire’s side. Kaya Scodelario plays Claire, with Robbie Amell as Chris, Hannah John-Kamen as Jill, Avan Jogia as Leon and Tom Hopper as Wesker, and Neal McDonough is Birkin. It’s a good line-up of names, and the film is more faithful to the games than any of the earlier ones, with the exact locations and characters’ roles all in place.

But I kept thinking about Alice. Milla Jovovich had been the constant for six films, from the laser corridor in the Hive, through the clone-filled facility in Retribution, to her last stand in The Final Chapter, and she was really badass in a way that I missed here. She’d been through so much that seeing a new group of characters start from scratch felt like a step back, even if it’s a faithful one. I’ve liked her in this kind of role since The Fifth Element, and the reboot doesn’t try to replace her.

The ending has Umbrella’s plan to wipe the town off the map at dawn. The survivors flee through the tunnels under the police station to an Umbrella train, fight what’s left of Birkin along the way, and get out as the city is destroyed. There’s a scene in the credits where Ada Wong revives Wesker, which promises more to come. The setup is clear enough that a sequel looks likely, whichever way this one lands with people.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5. It’s faithful to the games, and there’s plenty that will please people who love them, but it felt to me like too much was happening on screen, and I really missed Alice. I’d still say it’s worth seeing if you’re a fan of the series, and it’s a very different beast from the Alice films. Just don’t go in expecting her.

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flux 04 village of the angels
Doctor WhoTelevision

Village of the Angels: Don’t Look at the Drawing

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Finally. Four chapters in, Flux stops sprinting between six plots and puts almost everything into one village on one night, and the result is the best episode of the Whittaker era by a comfortable distance. “Village of the Angels” is a proper horror story with a proper monster and a proper sense of place, and I really enjoyed it. Whatever reservations I’ve had about this run, and I’ve had plenty, this hour is the show operating at full strength.

The setup is old-fashioned in the best possible way. It’s Medderton, Devon, in 1967, where a little girl has vanished and a professor is running psychic experiments in a big cold house. There’s a body in a field, a village that won’t talk about it, and something in the churchyard that moves when you look away. It plays like proper folk horror, all lamplight and hedgerows and people being unhelpful on doorsteps, and it’s the first time all series that the setting has felt like somewhere rather than a backdrop to be cut away from.

The Angels are frightening again

I’d started to think the Weeping Angels were spent. Blink is a masterpiece, The Angels Take Manhattan got a decent farm-the-humans idea out of them, and everything since has felt like a design being wheeled out because it tests well. This episode fixes that by adding rules rather than repeating the old ones louder. An Angel can live inside an image of itself, so a pencil drawing on a page is every bit as dangerous as a statue in a graveyard. An Angel can inhabit a person too, speaking through them, arguing with them, taking their body a piece at a time. Best of all, an Angel can be a fugitive from its own kind, which means this isn’t a hunt, it’s an extradition, and the village is simply where a deserter went to ground.

The images throughout are superb. The drawing grows a little each time somebody checks on it. There’s an Angel in the television screen. Then the walls of the house turn out to be lined with them, standing perfectly still in the dark while a torch beam sweeps past and doesn’t quite reach. Somebody on this production understood that the trick with these monsters was never the pounce, it’s the waiting, and they built the whole hour around it.

A Weeping Angel in Village of the Angels

Claire, Jericho and a village that behaves like one

Annabel Scholey is excellent as Claire, who has been carrying an Angel in her head since she met the Doctor in a Liverpool street in the fog back in chapter one. Playing a woman arguing with something inside her own skull could go badly wrong in about four different directions, and Scholey keeps it small and exhausted instead, which is far more upsetting than hysteria would have been. She’s tired of it. That’s the detail that sells it. Kevin McNally is the other gift here. Professor Jericho is a slightly pompous psychic researcher who turns out to be brave in an entirely unshowy way, and when he decides to stay and help rather than run, it lands because the episode bothered to make him a person first.

The village works too, and that matters more than it sounds. Gerald and Jean bicker in their kitchen, the search party works its way across the fields, and there’s a quiet sense that everybody knows something happened here in 1901 and nobody wants to be the first to say so. The 1967 setting earns its keep as well: late enough for a television set to matter, early enough that a Devon village is properly cut off after dark. No mobile phones, no streetlights past the green, one road out. Horror needs isolation and a period setting hands it to you for free, and The Haunting of Villa Diodati showed last series that this era is at its best when it gives people rooms and lets them be frightened in them.

Yaz and Dan get something to do at last

I’ve complained for three weeks that Mandip Gill has been handed nothing, so credit where it’s due. Yaz is properly in this one, leading, deducing, keeping Dan steady and working out the 1901 material on her own. She does it by talking to people and paying attention, which is exactly what a police officer would do and exactly what the show has spent two series forgetting she is. Gill has always been good, and one episode of decent material is all it takes to prove the material was the issue. Sending the pair of them back sixty-six years by Angel touch is a smart use of the monster’s oldest trick, and their scenes stuck in a village that hasn’t happened yet carry real charge.

Dan continues to be the best thing Chibnall added to the show. Bishop plays fear well without playing it broad, and his running commentary keeps the hour from tipping over into po-faced misery. The reveal that Peggy is the missing girl, displaced in exactly the way Yaz and Dan have just been displaced, closes a loop the episode quietly set up in its first five minutes and never once underlines. It’s a neat little bit of plotting, and it’s typical of an hour that trusts me to notice things.

The ending is the boldest thing this era has done

And then the Doctor loses. Not partially, not cleverly, not with a hidden escape route she’d set up earlier. Division turns up, the Angel that’s been hiding inside Claire finishes its work, and the Doctor is turned into a Weeping Angel and taken, frozen mid-sentence, while her friends stand and watch it happen. What makes it work is that the episode has spent fifty minutes teaching me the rules that make it possible. An Angel can inhabit a person, an Angel can be sent somewhere as a punishment, and Division has the authority to order it.

None of that is invented in the last thirty seconds to make the shock land, which is the usual failing of a big cliffhanger, and the difference is enormous. The ending is startling because it’s the logical end of everything the hour has already told me, not because the show suddenly changed the rules. It’s an extraordinary cliffhanger and the one fearless swing in the whole run. The reason that last shot lands so hard is that the previous forty-five minutes never once wander off to check on a subplot on another planet. Discipline is what makes the shock work.

Rating: 4/5. Really enjoyed this one. Genuinely frightening, beautifully shot and properly written, with the best guest cast of the series and a monster restored to something worth being scared of again. It’s the episode that shows what Flux could have been all the way through if it had only trusted one story at a time.

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Television

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni – A delightful return

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The Higurashi franchise returns with a new rendition of the classic 2006 series. Most of the original Japanese voice actors reprise their roles once more to finally settle the mysteries of Hinamizawa. This article contains no spoilers.

  • Screenshot 4176
    Mion, Keiichi and Rena walking to school

After a grueling long three month delay, the latest adaptation of the horror-drama Higurashi franchise, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Gou, has finally made its debut for the fall 2020 anime season. Despite the horrific story that takes place in the fictional Hinamizawa, fans of the franchise were more than willing to relive those dire moments, this time in high-definition.

It has been long speculated whether the new season would be a reboot, remake or potential sequel of the original Higurashi anime that aired back in 2006. Regardless of the outcome, the amount of hype that surrounded Gou’s debut made it abundantly clear that fans were excited and wanted more Higurashi, regardless of rendition.

Long waited reunion

The first episode was a sigh of relief as they brought back all the familiar faces and lovable characters of the original series. The personalities and interactions with one another were all too familiar, like reuniting with an old batch of friends after countless years. Keiichi still pretending to be aloof, Rena’s overwhelming obsession with all things cute, and Shion always acting like the geezer of the group, were all the very same unique traits that encompassed who they were in the original adaptation.

An even more delightful surprise, perhaps, was the reassembly of the original Japanese voice actors from nearly 15 years ago. Gou managed to bring most of the cast back, with all of them reprising their original role. Although most of the cast are now well into their adult years, like true professionals, they portray their younger counterparts without missing a step. Yukari Tamura, Yui Horie and Mai Nakahara, all of which have since become renowned voice actors and singers in Japan since casting for Higurashi, will also be returning.

  • Screenshot 4040
    Rena looks on while she plays in her beloved scrap yard

If that didn’t bring back nostalgic memories for previous watchers, then maybe the familiar soundtracks will. Not only does Gou feature soundtracks from the older seasons, devoted fans will quickly notice that it also includes music from the original visual novel game that was released way back in 2002. As simple as they were from a composer’s point of view, they helped put together everlasting scenes and moments that players and watchers would remember years later.

Future like no other

Fans of the franchise will quickly notice the vibrant new art style of the anime, courtesy of studio Passione. The rural village of Hinamizawa looks more alive and vastly colourful than all of its predecessors put together. Although the layout of the village looks the same, the sharper animation and brilliant colouring make it feel much more immersive and memorable. The characters’ newly drawn style should draw some comparisons to another popular anime known for their subtle yet terrifyingly accurate portrayal of facial expressions, Nisio Isin’s Monogatari series. That is because the lead character designer for that anime, Akio Watanabe, is also the lead designer for Gou.

Less than halfway through the first episode, it should come as no surprise that the same events from the original anime were unfolding, this time with some additional new scenes. Keiichi is still regarded as the new kid on the block while he learns more about the history of Hinamizawa as well as his friends, Rena, Shion, Satoko and Rika. As secrets slip out, trickles of doubt and mistrust begin to cloud Keiichi’s mind and long before he begins to even realize, the warm sunny days spent hanging out with his most precious friends are that of the past.

From the mastermind himself

To the resounding joy of many, Gou begins its story by retelling the first arc, Onikakushi-hen, only this time being more faithful to its original source material, the visual novels released nearly two decades ago. After the premiere of the first episode, the original creator of the Higurashi series, Ryukishi Zero-Nana or more notably by his pen name Ryukishi07, shared his thoughts and insight on it for an interview with Funimation.

  • Screenshot 4545
    The main cast having a picnic at the shrine

It was Ryukishi’s intention to find a perfect medium that would appeal to both those who’ve seen Higurashi before and for those who are first time watchers. He ended the interview by thanking his longtime supporters and reminding everyone to tune into the next episode. “Things are finally going to start moving with the next episode, so I hope you watch carefully from episode two on,” he concluded.

Regardless of how episode two will unfold, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Gou has managed to bring back warm yet chilling memories of the past, and has us tense in excitement for the unexpected outcomes of the next episode onwards. It matters not whether Gou is a remake, reboot, sequel or anything else in between, studio Passione has done a phenomenal job bringing these illustrious characters back to life and the staff have done well to incorporate everything the fans have cherished in the previous seasons back into this one.

With the gifted mind of Ryukishi at the helm of the production staff, there is no doubt that Gou will become a series that longtime fans can adore, while also serving as a gateway for new fans to explore the frightening beauty of the magnificent Higurashi universe.

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The Haunting of Villa Diodati: The Night Frankenstein Got Written - Doctor Who episode still
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Haunting of Villa Diodati: The Night Frankenstein Got Written

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Put the Doctor in a haunted house on the night that Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein, and then walk a half-converted Cyberman through the front door. It should be too much. Maxine Alderton’s script makes it look easy, and “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” is the most confident, best-directed and most genuinely frightening hour the Whittaker era produced. It is also the one episode of this run that does what I keep asking the era to do: it builds a monster first, and lets the meaning come out of what the monster does.

A proper ghost story

The first half is played completely straight as gothic horror and it works.

Lake Geneva, 1816, the year without a summer. Byron is preening, Percy Shelley is missing, Polidori is sleepwalking, and the house will not let anybody leave. Corridors loop back on themselves. A door leads to the room you just left. The fam keep walking down the same passage and arriving where they started, and Emma Sullivan directs the whole thing with a patience the era has rarely shown, holding shots long enough for the geometry to feel wrong rather than cutting away to reassure you.

The period detail is good and the casting is better. Jacob Collins-Levy plays Byron as a vain, faintly ridiculous man who is nonetheless dangerous to be near, and his attempts to flirt with the Doctor are both funny and slightly appalling. Lili Miller’s Mary is watchful and unimpressed and clearly the cleverest person in the building, which is exactly right for someone about to write the book that invents modern science fiction.

There are a dozen small horrors before anything alien turns up. The skeletal hand that scuttles across the floor and goes for a throat. The portrait that follows people. Polidori fighting a duel in his sleep. Graham looking for a lavatory and finding the same corridor four times, which is played for comedy and then quietly stops being funny. The show has not committed to atmosphere like this since Blink, and it holds for a full twenty-five minutes before the plot arrives.

Ashad is the best Cyberman in fifty years

And then the lone Cyberman that Captain Jack warned about in Fugitive of the Judoon comes through the wall, and the episode gets even better.

Ashad is a broken conversion. Half his face is still human, the metal has failed across his chest, and he is in constant pain from a process that did not take. Which means he has feelings, and hates having them, and cannot stop. Patrick O’Kane gives the finest guest performance of the era, all shaking rage and disgust, a creature who despises what he is and cannot go back to what he was. He talks about his own children, whom he had converted, and the memory clearly still costs him something.

This is what the Cybermen should always have been. The horror of the concept was never the marching or the shouting, it was the person still trapped somewhere inside. Ever since 2006 the show has mostly been using them as generic robots with a good silhouette, and I have been complaining about it since Closing Time. Here, finally, is a Cyberman who is frightening because of what was done to him rather than because he is large.

The scene where he demands the Cyberium, and the Doctor realises Percy Shelley has absorbed it, gives Whittaker her best material of the run. She is genuinely out of options. She can hand over a weapon that will doom billions, or refuse and let Shelley die, which erases Frankenstein and most of the literature that followed. Her fury at the fam when they push her towards the easy answer, that sometimes even she has to choose, is the closest this Doctor gets to the steel the part usually carries. The Guardian picked this one out as the point the season found itself, and that is about right.

The house itself deserves credit as a piece of design. Villa Diodati is all candlelight and heavy furniture and doorways that lead somewhere they should not, and the production resists the urge to over-light it. You spend a lot of the episode not quite able to see the corners of rooms, which is exactly right for a ghost story and almost unheard of in modern television, where everything tends to be lit for clarity. When Ashad finally appears he does so out of that same darkness, and the two halves of the episode share a visual language even when they do not share a plot.

The fam are also used better here than anywhere else in the run. Splitting them across the household gives each of them somebody to play against: Yaz with Mary, Ryan with Percy, Graham lost and looking for a toilet. It is the difference between three companions and a crowd, and it makes you wonder why the era so rarely bothered. Mandip Gill in particular benefits from being paired with someone who takes her seriously, and her scenes with Lili Miller have an easy warmth that Yaz has almost never been allowed.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati: The Night Frankenstein Got Written - Doctor Who episode still

What makes it work when the rest doesn’t

I keep saying the era delivers its ideas in speeches instead of dramatising them. This episode is the proof that the team could do otherwise whenever they chose.

There is an idea here about creation and monstrosity, about a woman inventing Frankenstein on the same night she watches a man made of stitched-together parts beg for something, and nobody ever says it. No character explains the parallel. No caption appears. Mary Shelley simply watches Ashad, and you can see her filing it away, and the episode trusts you entirely. That is the difference between this and Rosa, which had a better subject and a worse method.

The Doctor loses, too, which matters. She hands over the Cyberium to save one life and one book, and she knows exactly what it will cost, and the episode ends with her walking towards a war she has just armed. After a season and a half of problems being solved by a clever technical trick in the last four minutes, an ending where the right choice is also the catastrophic one is bracing.

If the era has a single episode I would point to as evidence that the criticism was never about the cast or the production, it is this one. Same Doctor, same companions, same budget, same year. The difference is a script that builds a situation and lets the people in it react, rather than deciding on a message and constructing a delivery route. Everything I have complained about across two seasons is absent here, which tells you it was always a choice.

What it leaves behind is Ashad, a conversion that failed halfway, in agony and ashamed of it, the best Cyberman the show has built since the 1960s. It leaves a house that will not let anyone leave, and twenty-five minutes of gothic horror played entirely straight. It leaves Mary Shelley, watching a stitched-together man plead, and saying nothing at all about what she is about to write. It leaves the Doctor choosing wrong on purpose, with her eyes open, because the alternative was worse. And it leaves a Cyberium loose in the hands of something that hates itself.

Rating: 4/5. Atmospheric, superbly cast and genuinely frightening, with a monster that finally understands what Cybermen are for and a Doctor who is given a real choice and gets it wrong. It falls just short of the top only because the ghost-story half and the Cyberman half never quite fuse. Everything else here is the era at its absolute best.

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Can You Hear Me?: Detached Fingers and a Conversation It Can't Finish - Doctor Who episode still
Doctor WhoTelevision

Can You Hear Me?: Detached Fingers and a Conversation It Can’t Finish

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

There is a genuinely frightening episode inside “Can You Hear Me?”, and for about twenty-five minutes you are watching it. A man appears at the end of your bed while you sleep, detaches his own fingers, and sends them floating into your ears to take what is in your head. That is a properly nasty piece of nightmare logic, the sort of thing this show used to do to children in the 1970s and has mostly stopped attempting. Ian Gelder plays it beautifully. Then the plot arrives, and then the ending arrives, and the episode ends up saying something it plainly did not intend to say.

The best monster idea of the season

Zellin is a very good villain, and the reason is that the episode gives him almost nothing to do except be present.

He does not chase anyone. He does not threaten in the usual way. He appears where he should not be, in bedrooms, in hospitals, in memories, standing perfectly still and talking pleasantly, and the horror comes entirely from the violation rather than from any physical danger. The detached fingers are the image everyone remembers and they deserve to be. There is something deeply wrong about the casualness of it, a man idly removing part of himself and letting it drift across a dark room towards a sleeping person’s head.

The Aleppo sequence is the strongest thing in the hour. A fourteenth-century hospital, a young woman called Tahira who has been having night terrors, and a creature made of shadow and teeth that turns out to be hers. Aruhan Galieva is good in a part that could easily have been a plot function, and the setting is used with more care than the era usually manages: this is a place of medicine and learning, not a backdrop for peril, and the episode bothers to say so.

Ryan’s strand back in Sheffield is decent too. His friend Tibo has been sinking while Ryan has been off travelling, and Tosin Cole plays the guilt of the returning friend well. The idea that the price of the TARDIS is the life you are not living has been sitting under this era since Arachnids in the UK, and this is the first time the show has looked directly at it.

The plot lets the monster down

Where it comes apart is Rakaya, and the moment the episode explains itself.

Zellin works as an unexplained presence. Giving him a partner, a backstory, an imprisonment between two planets and a millennia-long grudge turns a nightmare into a filing entry. Clare-Hope Ashitey is fine, but the character exists to be freed, gloat, and be re-imprisoned, and the animated sequence used to deliver their history stops the episode dead at precisely the point it should be tightening. The animation itself is nicely done and entirely the wrong choice, because it hands you the answer to the question that was making the thing frightening.

The resolution is worse. The Doctor beats two immortal beings by talking to them and then trapping them in a crystal, which is roughly the same solution the season has used twice already, and it takes about ninety seconds. Whatever dread the first half built is spent in a scene where Zellin stops being unknowable and starts being a man complaining that the Doctor has ruined his fun.

The fam material fares better. The sequence where each of them is shown their worst fear, Graham back in the hospital, Yaz on the roadside at thirteen, Ryan seventy years too late, is well constructed and Bradley Walsh is as reliable as ever. Fan sites like The Doctor Who Companion rated the horror of this one highly and I would agree with them about the first half without hesitation.

There is a wider problem with how the era handles its immortals, and this is the clearest case. Zellin and Rakaya are presented as beings who have toyed with humanity across millennia, which should make them terrifying and instead makes them petty. They are bored gods who have spent eternity playing games with sleeping people, and the moment you attach a squabbling couple’s backstory to that, the scale collapses. The Toymaker worked because nobody explained him. The Beast worked because the show refused to confirm what it was. Naming a thing and giving it a grievance is the fastest way to shrink it.

The fam’s fears are the one place the episode uses its idea properly. Graham back in the hospital chair waiting for results, Yaz on a roadside at thirteen, Ryan returning to a Sheffield seventy years too late with everyone gone: these are specific, personal and quietly devastating, and none of them need a monster to explain them. Whittaker gets a decent moment too, glimpsing something in her own head that the show does not identify, which is the correct amount to show.

Can You Hear Me?: Detached Fingers and a Conversation It Can't Finish - Doctor Who episode still

The scene everyone argued about

And then Graham tells the Doctor he is frightened his cancer will come back, and she does not know what to say, and says so, and moves on.

I understand what the scene was aiming for. The Doctor is an alien who is genuinely poor at this, and there is a real, honest version of that idea. The problem is the placement. This is the closing minute of an episode that has spent its runtime on nightmares, isolation, and people struggling to talk about what is in their heads, and it has been building towards the argument that speaking up is the thing that helps. Then a frightened man speaks up, and the person he says it to gives him nothing, and the credits run.

The episode does not seem to notice the shape of what it has done. There is no follow-up, no later scene where she does better, no acknowledgement from anyone that Graham has just been left hanging. An hour that wants to tell you to reach out ends by demonstrating what it costs when someone reaches out and is not met. If that were deliberate it would be devastating. Nothing in the surrounding forty-five minutes suggests it is.

It is a genuine shame, because the ambition is real and the first act is among the best things the era produced. An episode about the things that come for people in the dark, built around a monster who does nothing but arrive, is exactly the sort of story this show should be telling. It needed the confidence to leave its own questions alone.

What it leaves behind is Zellin, standing at the foot of a bed and posting his own fingers into a sleeper’s ears, the most genuinely frightening image the Whittaker era produced. It leaves fourteenth-century Aleppo, a hospital rendered with real care, and Tahira, whose nightmare turns out to be hers to command. It leaves Ryan and Tibo, and the first honest look at what travelling costs the people left at home. It leaves an animated history lesson that arrives exactly when the tension should be building and takes all the mystery out of the room. And it leaves Graham, saying the hardest thing he has ever said out loud, and being handed nothing back.

Rating: 2/5. Half of a properly frightening episode, with the best monster design of the era and a first act that genuinely unsettles, undone by an explanation nobody needed, a resolution recycled from earlier in the same season, and a closing scene that undercuts the entire point of the hour. The fingers will stay with me. So will the look on Bradley Walsh’s face.

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resolution doctor who
Doctor WhoTelevision

Resolution: One Dalek, Dug Out of the Ground in Three Pieces

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

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.

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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.

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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.

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the witchfinders morax
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Witchfinders: Nobody Listens to Her Now

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

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 Witchfinders: Nobody Listens to Her Now - Doctor Who episode still

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.

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Arachnids in the UK
Doctor WhoTelevision

Arachnids in the UK: The Spiders Aren’t the Problem

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

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.

Arachnids in the UK

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.

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World Enough and Time: He Was Minutes Away the Whole Time - Doctor Who episode still
Doctor WhoTelevision

World Enough and Time: He Was Minutes Away the Whole Time

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This is the best episode Doctor Who has produced in a decade, and possibly ever. I want to be careful about saying that, because it’s the sort of claim that gets made about every good finale, but “World Enough and Time” is a genuinely extraordinary piece of television: a horror story built on a single piece of physics, executed with total control, that takes its time and then does something unforgivable. It is also the cruellest thing this show has ever done to a companion, and it does it in the first ten minutes.

The premise is the whole episode and it is beautiful. A four-hundred-mile colony ship is caught at the edge of a black hole, reverse-thrusting to escape, and because of the gravitational gradient time passes at wildly different rates along its length: at the top, near the engines, a few minutes go by, while at the other end, hundreds of miles down, years pass. That’s real physics used as a horror engine and Moffat wrings everything from it. The Doctor and Nardole are stuck at the top. Bill is at the bottom. Every minute they spend working out what to do is months of her life, so the rescue is always coming and the rescue is always, arithmetically, far too late. Rachel Talalay’s direction is superb throughout, the ship grimy and cavernous and industrial, all rust and cabling and vast empty spaces, and the two ends of it shot like different genres: up top a sleek science fiction problem, down below a decaying hospital in permanent twilight.

Bill is shot through the chest inside the opening act. A huge hole, a genuine wound, and no cleverness available, because the Doctor is hundreds of miles and several years away and the people who take her body away are the ones who can fix it. It’s a shocking piece of pacing, since most episodes would build to that and this one uses it as a premise, spending the rest of the hour on what happens to somebody after the disaster, alone, for a very long time. She survives, with a mechanical unit in her chest keeping her alive. And then she waits. She’s told the Doctor is coming, and she believes it, and keeps believing it, and the episode very carefully lets years accumulate in the corners of the frame, the same view from the same window, the same conversations, the same corridor. Pearl Mackie is outstanding, and what she plays is not terror but the erosion of it, a woman who has been frightened, and then bored, and then resigned, and who has organised her whole existence around a promise made by a man she is no longer certain is real.

The hospital

The floor she’s on is a hospital, and the patients are the reason this episode is remembered. They are wrapped in bandages, wired into beds, with crude speaker units bolted where their mouths should be, and the units can only produce a few words. Every one of them says the same thing, over and over, in a flat electronic monotone: pain. The staff’s solution is to turn the volume down. That is one of the most genuinely disturbing images this programme has ever put on screen, and the episode holds on it, because these are people being processed, early-stage conversions, in agony, with the agony treated as a noise complaint.

World Enough and Time: He Was Minutes Away the Whole Time - Doctor Who episode still

And then the surgical wards, and the cloth-faced helmets on the workbench, and the show reveals what it’s been building: these are the original Mondasian Cybermen, the 1966 design, blank cloth faces and handlebar headlamps and singsong voices. Restoring them isn’t nostalgia, because the crude, handmade, obviously-human-underneath quality of the original design is far more upsetting than the chrome versions, since you can still see the person in it. This is the Cybermen being invented from scratch by desperate people on a dying ship, for entirely practical reasons, floor by floor. The operating theatre is the moment it tips fully into horror, because it isn’t a laboratory, it’s a production line, run by an overworked staff with no malice whatsoever, doing conversions because the ship’s population is dying of a gravity well and this is the only way anyone survives long enough to matter. There’s a chalkboard with a list of upgrades. There’s a queue. The banality is the point, because nobody down here is a villain, they’re just solving a resourcing problem and the solution is to stop being people. That’s the same argument Oxygen made earlier in the season, arriving here at full strength: the Cybermen are not an invading force, they’re what happens when survival gets optimised.

Mr Razor, and the tear

The disguise is the one element that doesn’t quite hold, and it doesn’t matter much. Bill’s only companion during the long wait is Mr Razor, a shuffling, kindly, hunched old caretaker who brings her food and watches television with her and keeps her sane for years. He is, of course, the Master, John Simm under a great deal of prosthetic, and the reveal is played beautifully even though a good portion of the audience will have called it early. What matters isn’t the surprise, it’s the arithmetic. He has spent ten years being kind to her. That’s not a disguise maintained for a scene, that’s a decade of a man’s life spent grooming a woman for the specific purpose of making her betrayal complete, and he does it patiently, and gently, and enjoys it. Missy and the Master meeting is a genuinely delicious idea, two versions of the same person, one of whom is possibly reforming and finds her past self embarrassing, and Gomez and Simm have terrific chemistry in the few minutes they get.

And then the last shot. Bill is standing among the Cybermen, converted, in the cloth mask, and she has been there some time. The Doctor arrives ten years too late. The camera holds on the blank face, and the flat voice says her own name, and there is a single tear running down the fabric. There is no reversal, no last-minute rescue, no reveal that it’s someone else. The episode ends there. It’s devastating and it’s earned, because the show spent forty minutes making you sit in her waiting, so that when the cost arrives you understand exactly how long she paid it for.

What it leaves behind is time running at two speeds, real physics as a horror engine, every minute the rescue takes costing months of her life, and nothing else needed. It leaves a companion shot in the first ten minutes, the disaster used as premise rather than climax. It leaves patients who can only say one word and staff who respond by turning the volume down, the worst thing this show has ever shown. It leaves the Mondasian design restored, cloth faces and singsong voices, cruder than the chrome and far more frightening because the person is still visible. And it leaves ten years of kindness as a con, the Master spending a decade being gentle to her because the betrayal is better that way.

Rating: 5/5. Flawless. A single elegant idea, developed patiently, shot beautifully, and paid off with an ending the show has the nerve not to undo. Pearl Mackie gives the performance of the era, the Cyberman origin is the definitive version, and the closing image is one of the few in this programme’s history that genuinely earns the word unbearable. He was always coming for her. He said so. She waited ten years, and he was minutes away the entire time.

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extremis
Doctor WhoTelevision

Extremis: A Book That Kills the People Who Read It

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The best hook of the season, and possibly of the era: there is a text in the Vatican’s forbidden library, translated from an unknown original, and everyone who reads it kills themselves. Not out of horror. Not because it curses them. Because once you have read it, you understand something, and once you understand it there is no reason to carry on. “Extremis” is Steven Moffat doing what he is genuinely best at, a puzzle box with a horrible answer at the bottom, and it is the smartest forty-five minutes Doctor Who has produced in a long time. It plays as a dry run for something very big and very nasty, which is exactly what it is, and it’s still the most interesting thing in the season by a distance.

The Haereticum

The atmosphere is superb from the first scene. Cardinals arrive at a university to consult a blind Doctor about a heresy, the Vatican’s secret library turns out to be a vast underground labyrinth called the Haereticum, and there are candles and stone and a room where the previous readers’ bodies are still sitting. The horror is intellectual rather than physical, and the episode trusts that completely. There’s no creature stalking the corridors for the first two acts, just a document and a growing pile of people who read it and then calmly went off to end themselves. When the Doctor finds a laptop with the file open and a line of code running, the dread is entirely about what the file says.

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The Monks are a strong design when they finally appear. They’re corpse-like, with desiccated faces and sunken features, robed in red, and they move with an unhurried, processional gait that belongs to clergy rather than predators. Putting them in a story set largely in the Vatican is a deliberate provocation, and the episode gets real mileage out of the visual rhyme between the two sets of robed figures walking the same corridors. They’re one of the better new creatures of the modern era, and the episode is disciplined about how little it shows them.

The shadow test

The answer is the thing. This is a simulation. The Vatican, the Pentagon, CERN, the Doctor, Bill and Nardole are all a projection being run by the Monks as a rehearsal, a way of modelling humanity in enough detail to plan a flawless invasion of the real Earth. The Veritas is the document in which somebody inside the simulation worked out what they were, and the reason readers kill themselves is that discovering you are a subroutine is not survivable news. The test for it is beautiful in its simplicity: ask a room of people to each say a random number. Real people produce noise. Simulated people all say the same number, because the same routine generates them all. It’s the sort of detail that makes a high concept land, cheap to shoot, instantly comprehensible, and completely chilling.

The scenes where it dawns on them are the best acting in the season. Nardole crumbling to dust mid-sentence. Bill working out what she is and having about eight seconds to feel it. And a simulated Doctor, a copy running on borrowed processing, sitting in a room understanding that he is not the man he thought he was and that nothing he does tonight can matter. Except it does, and that’s the moment the episode earns its reputation. He points out that a simulation good enough to model the Doctor is good enough to produce something that behaves like him, and so he does the thing the real one would do, emailing the whole file out of the simulation to his own real self as a warning. Capaldi plays it with enormous, quiet dignity: a fake man deciding that being a copy of somebody decent is a sufficient reason to act decently. It’s the best thing the Twelfth Doctor has ever been given, and the whole hour is an experiment that pays off.

image

The CERN sequence is the episode’s best single scene and the one that sells the premise. The Doctor arrives to find the physicists having a party, drinking and laughing and saying goodbye to each other, because they’ve read the Veritas, run the numbers themselves, confirmed it, and decided to go out together rather than one at a time. One of them explains it while handing round drinks, entirely calm. They’ve rigged the building to explode. They ask him, politely, to leave first. It’s a wonderfully unsettling piece of writing because nobody in it is hysterical. These are people who checked the working, agreed with it, and are now doing the only thing that makes sense to them, cheerfully. Terror would have been less frightening. The episode is cut nonlinearly too, interleaving the simulation with the Missy flashbacks, and the two strands are shot very differently, the Vatican material dim and candlelit against execution scenes that are flat and bright. It’s disorienting on first viewing in a way that turns out to be entirely deliberate, since one of those strands is the only one that actually happened.

The vault, and what it costs

Running underneath is the season’s other mystery, finally opened. The flashbacks answer what’s in the vault the Doctor has been guarding at the university. He was hired as an executioner, apparently a professional service, for a body that needed someone who could be trusted to do it properly, and the condemned was Missy. He didn’t kill her. He faked it, locked her in a quantum-fold chamber, and swore an oath to guard her body for a thousand years. Michelle Gomez is very good in a small amount of screen time, and the material changes what Nardole has been doing entirely: he isn’t a comic sidekick, he’s an enforcement mechanism, left behind by River with instructions to make the Doctor keep his word. It’s a lot of plot to carry alongside a simulation story, and the episode juggles it well, mostly because both strands are about the same thing, which is a man being bound by promises he made to people who aren’t around to hold him to them.

The one criticism worth making is about shape. This is the first act of a three-part story, and everything genuinely great about it is self-contained. The simulation, the Veritas and the shadow test don’t carry forward in any meaningful way. What carries forward is the Monks’ plan, which is much more ordinary than the episode that introduces it. There’s a version of this where “Extremis” is a standalone masterpiece rather than a prologue, and I suspect it would be better remembered for it.

What it leaves behind is a text you can’t survive reading, not cursed but simply true, where the truth removes the point of continuing. It leaves the Haereticum, the Vatican’s forbidden library as a stone labyrinth full of the people who got there first. It leaves the random number test, cheap and elegant and horrifying. It leaves a copy who behaves like the original, since the Doctor we follow isn’t real, works it out, and does the right thing anyway. And it leaves Missy in the vault, alive because he was hired to execute her and didn’t, with Nardole quietly enforcing the thousand-year oath he swore instead.

Rating: 4.5/5. Ingenious, frightening and unusually philosophical, with a central idea executed with total confidence and a performance from Capaldi that carries the whole thing. It loses half a mark only because its brilliance is largely disposable, since this is a prologue to a much more conventional story and almost nothing about the simulation matters afterwards. Everyone who read it worked out what they were, and stopped. He worked it out, and sent an email.

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Oxygen: The Suits Weren't Broken - Doctor Who episode still
Doctor WhoTelevision

Oxygen: The Suits Weren’t Broken

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This is the best episode of Series 10 and one of the best of the Capaldi era, and it manages it on a small set with a handful of actors and a monster that is, essentially, a jacket. “Oxygen” is a base-under-siege story with the safety catch removed: genuinely frightening, properly paced, morally furious, and willing to end on a permanent injury to its lead that the show then actually honours for the next three episodes. It’s also the angriest thing Doctor Who has broadcast in a very long time.

The premise is one line and it does everything. On the mining station Chasm Forge the air is not free. The station is deliberately unpressurised, the crew wear smart spacesuits which supply oxygen, and that oxygen is metered, billed and deducted from wages. You are charged for breathing, so breathe efficiently and you profit, breathe badly and you owe. Everything else follows with horrible logic. The suits are the company’s property rather than the crew’s, they contain the crew rather than protecting them, and when the corporation’s algorithm determines that the human workers have become less efficient than the equipment they’re wearing, the suits are issued an instruction to deal with the surplus. So they kill the crew, and then keep walking, because the bodies are still perfectly serviceable labour once the awkward organic part has stopped complaining. The image is superb: dead miners shambling through corridors, arms out, faces slack behind visors, moving with the deliberate gait of something being driven from outside. They aren’t zombies. The suits are simply finishing the shift.

The Doctor’s summary is the thing everyone will remember: this isn’t a malfunction, it’s the market. The suits are not broken, they are performing a cost analysis correctly, the crew were made redundant in the most literal possible sense, and the company will be along shortly to collect the equipment. Jamie Mathieson’s script never softens this into a comfortable moral. There’s no rogue executive to blame and no computer that went mad, there’s an accounting decision executed by machinery, and the episode’s clear position is that the horror is the ordinary functioning of the system rather than a fault in it. When the survivors work out the actual solution, making themselves more expensive to kill than to keep alive, it isn’t a triumph, it’s a negotiation with a spreadsheet. That’s a genuinely bleak thing for a family show to argue, and “Oxygen” argues it without flinching or apologising.

The cost

The reason it lands is that the episode charges real prices. Bill’s suit is faulty from the start, a slightly-too-large helmet that keeps failing, and the episode plays that for tension repeatedly before cashing it in. In vacuum, with her suit dead, the Doctor gives her his helmet. She survives. He doesn’t get away with it, because exposure to hard vacuum burns out his eyes and he is blind for the rest of the episode. And then he stays blind. He fakes his way through the ending, hides it from Bill, admits it to Nardole in the last scene. After a run of stories that undid their own consequences, the button in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS and the memory wipe in Smile, a show that lets its lead pay for a decision and keeps the bill on the table is enormously welcome.

There’s also a beat where Bill, thinking she’s dying, is furious rather than tearful, and Pearl Mackie plays it with real bite. She has spent five episodes finding this wonderful, and here she works out that it is also a job where you die in a corridor for somebody else’s quarterly figures. The survivors are thinly drawn but purposefully so, and one detail is worth flagging: Dahh-Ren is blue-skinned, and when Bill reacts to him the episode plays out a very short exchange in which she assumes she’s caused offence, he explains that his species stopped caring about that particular distinction a long time ago, and everyone moves on. It’s four lines, it’s funny, and it quietly does the thing the episode is about, because the future has not abolished prejudice, it has simply moved on to sorting people by productivity instead. The teaching dynamic between the Doctor and Bill gives the hour its other shape. He’s brought her here as a lesson, that space is trying to kill you always and everything else is detail, and the episode is built as a seminar that goes catastrophically wrong. He lectures her about vacuum exposure in the opening minutes and then has to watch her experience it, which is a nastier version of the same joke Thin Ice made about handing her the decision: he keeps constructing object lessons and keeps discovering that the object is a person he’s now responsible for.

Oxygen: The Suits Weren't Broken - Doctor Who episode still

Small and tight

It’s a model of economy. One station, one corridor system, a crew of four survivors, a countdown measured in units of breath, and a threat that walks slowly and never stops. There’s no subplot, no runaround, no comic relief beyond Nardole’s grumbling. Charles Palmer directs the vacuum sequences properly, sound dropping out, the crawl along the hull, the suits closing in from both ends, and the decision to make the monsters slow is exactly right. Nothing here needs to sprint, because they have all the time in the world and you have about eight minutes of air. The one place it strains is the ending’s speed, since the corporate reckoning is dispatched in a couple of lines of voiceover and the idea that the survivors marched into head office and brought the company down is asserted rather than shown. Given the ferocity of everything before it, a slightly less tidy ending would have served better.

The title is the sharpest thing about it. Oxygen is the one commodity in the episode, the murder weapon, the currency, the countdown and the reason everybody is there, and it’s also the thing that is, on any planet with an atmosphere, free. The station’s entire economy rests on artificially withholding something abundant and then selling it back at a rate that ensures nobody can ever stop working. Nothing about that requires a science fiction premise to recognise, which is precisely why it stings.

Rating: 4.5/5. Lean, frightening, superbly directed and genuinely furious, with the best single premise of the Capaldi years and a consequence the series has the nerve to keep. It drops half a mark for a resolution that wraps the corporate reckoning up in narration, but everything else here is Doctor Who operating at full strength. The suits weren’t broken. They ran the numbers, found the crew wanting, and carried on working without them.

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Knock Knock: The House Always Takes Its Rent - Doctor Who episode still
Doctor WhoTelevision

Knock Knock: The House Always Takes Its Rent

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Every so often Doctor Who does a horror episode with no ambition beyond being frightening for forty-five minutes, and those are often the ones that stick. “Knock Knock” is a haunted-house story assembled from entirely familiar parts, the too-cheap rent and the locked tower and the landlord who appears at the window and the housemates picked off one by one, and it works because it commits to the atmosphere completely and because it has David Suchet doing something genuinely strange in the middle of it. It’s also, quietly, the most relatable premise the show has attempted in years: six students trying to find somewhere to live.

The rent

The opening act is the best part, and it’s almost entirely about property. Bill and five friends are being shown around flats that are damp, tiny and unaffordable, and are on the verge of giving up when a man appears and offers them an enormous, beautiful, wood-panelled house for a rent that makes no sense. There’s a tower they can’t use. There are no mobile signals. The windows shut on their own. They take it, obviously. Everybody takes it. The episode is very funny about the fact that the only genuinely implausible element in a story about alien woodlice is that six students could find anywhere at all. The horror grammar is well handled from there. Mike Bartlett’s script understands that a haunted house works on sound: the creaking, the tapping in the walls, doors that are closed when they were open. Bill Anderson shoots it with a lot of held frames and very little music, and the sequence where a housemate is absorbed into a wall, the wood simply closing over her while she’s mid-sentence, is genuinely nasty.

The housemates are better sketched than this kind of episode usually manages. They’re not victims queued up for the woodwork, they’re six people who’ve just agreed to live together and are still working out the etiquette of it, which the script gets right in small ways: the one who’s already annoying everyone with his music, the two circling a romance, the negotiation about who gets the good room. Shireen in particular is written as a real friend rather than a plot function, and the early scenes of them hauling boxes and bickering do the job that makes the later deaths land at all. There’s also a nice piece of restraint in how the house itself is introduced. The episode declines the obvious move of making it visibly sinister, with no cobwebs and no thunder and no ominous score. It’s simply a very fine old house in good repair, which is far more effective, because everything that’s wrong with it is a thing the tenants talk themselves out of noticing. The shutters that close on their own get explained away. The missing phone signal gets shrugged at. Horror by rationalisation is a genuinely good mode for a story about people who cannot afford to be picky.

The Doctor as an embarrassment

The best running joke is the Doctor’s presence. He helps Bill move in, refuses to leave, and installs himself in the house as an unexplained older man who won’t say what his relationship to her is. Bill is mortified throughout, and the episode gets a lot out of it, because he introduces himself as her grandfather, then denies it, then starts investigating the plumbing. Capaldi plays him as someone who has decided this is a laugh and is enjoying it enormously, and Pearl Mackie plays the specific social agony of your weird friend embarrassing you in front of new housemates. It’s a real character beat as well as a gag. He isn’t there because of a distress signal. He’s there because he’s bored of being parked at the university guarding a vault, and because he’s found somebody he likes and has invented a reason to stay.

Knock Knock: The House Always Takes Its Rent - Doctor Who episode still

The episode is quietly important for the two of them, in fact, because it’s the one where the boundary breaks. Everything up to now has been trips, whether to a colony world or to the frozen Thames in Thin Ice: he collects her, they go somewhere, he returns her. Here he turns up in her actual life, uninvited, and installs himself in her house among her friends, and she has to decide how to explain him. Her eventual answer, that he’s just someone she knows, is both a dodge and a promotion, because by the end of the episode he’s a fixture rather than a destination. That shift is what makes the season’s later losses land, and it happens here, in a scene about carrying boxes upstairs.

Dryads, and a daughter

The mechanism is decent: alien insects living in the woodwork, swarming, capable of dissolving a person into the structure of the house or of holding a body together indefinitely. The Landlord has been feeding tenants to them for decades. Every twenty years he fills the house, waits, and lets the woodwork take them, because the dryads keep his daughter Eliza alive, a woman made of polished wood sitting in a tower room, preserved somewhere between life and death. David Suchet, best known to most of the audience for thirteen series of Poirot, is superb, and the performance is the reason the episode holds. He plays the Landlord not as a monster but as a man performing a duty he stopped questioning a very long time ago, courteous and slightly nervous and apologetic in manner even while doing something monstrous. There’s a wonderful small moment where he tunes his tuning fork and listens to the house the way you’d check on a sleeping child.

The twist is that Eliza isn’t his daughter. She’s his mother, preserved since he was a boy, and he has spent his whole life as a child bringing food to a parent who stopped being able to say no to it. That’s a genuinely good reversal and it changes the meaning of all that courtesy, because he’s been obeying a mother rather than protecting a daughter. Where the episode wobbles is in the mechanics. Exactly what Eliza is, how much she knew, and why the dryads cooperate at all are left vague in a way that feels unfinished rather than mysterious. The ending, with Eliza choosing to let go, taking her son with her, and releasing the absorbed tenants, is emotionally right and logically hazy. If the dryads could simply restore everyone, a lot of the preceding horror deflates.

Rating: 3.5/5. Effective, atmospheric and unusually well acted for a monster-of-the-week, with a guest performance that elevates the whole thing and a first act that’s genuinely funny about the housing market. The internal logic of the dryads doesn’t survive much scrutiny and the restoration ending undercuts the deaths, but as a piece of straightforward Saturday-night horror it does exactly what it sets out to do. The rent was too low, the tower was locked, and the man at the door was only ever doing what his mother told him.

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Resident Evil: The Final Chapter theatrical poster
MoviesSciFi

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017): Alice Goes Back to the Hive

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I’m giving Resident Evil The Final Chapter a 3.5 out of 5. It wasn’t as good as some of the others, but it did finally end the story, or at least I think it did, and after six films that counts for something. With a title like that it feels like it’s meant to end the series, and by the last scene all the main baddies do seem to be dead. I’m honestly still not sure they won’t find a way to bring somebody back, but if this is the finish, it wraps things up more tidily than I expected it to.

The thing I keep coming back to is what it left out. The last film ended with Alice and her friends about to fight a huge battle for Washington, and I would definitely have wanted to see that. Instead The Final Chapter opens with Alice alone in the ruins of the city, and everyone else from that cliffhanger has been dealt with off-screen. I’d been waiting for that battle, so skipping it stayed with me all the way through the film. Everything else has to work harder to win me back after that, and some of it does.

Back to Raccoon City

The set-up is a good one. The Red Queen contacts Alice and tells her what’s left of humanity, which isn’t much, and says there’s an airborne anti-virus in the Hive under Raccoon City that would kill every infected thing on Earth. Alice has 48 hours before Umbrella wipes out the last human settlements, so she has to cross the country to get there. On the way she loses and escapes Dr. Isaacs, who’s alive after all, since the one she killed in the third film was a clone. In the ruins of Raccoon City she finds a fortified group of survivors, including Claire Redfield and a young woman called Abigail, and Umbrella steers a horde of the dead to besiege their fortress.

It’s been a long road from the first film, and going back to the Hive and the laser corridor brings the whole thing full circle, which is neat. Milla Jovovich has been doing this kind of role since The Fifth Element, and she carries the series as the one constant through all of it. Alice has been powerful, powerless and powerful again in that time, and here she’s back to fighting with her own two hands. I’d also point back to the second film, because a lot of the loose threads it started are tied up here.

Claire, Alice and Abigail standing together in the ruins
Claire, Alice and Abigail standing together in the ruins

Explaining the Red Queen and Alice

What I liked best is that they finally try to explain the Red Queen and Alice. Umbrella caused the apocalypse on purpose, so that the elite could sleep through it in cryosleep and wake up to a clean world. The Red Queen turns out to be modelled on Alicia Marcus, the daughter of Umbrella’s co-founder, who’s dying of an ageing disease. And Alice herself is Alicia’s clone, made with her memories stripped out. That gives the whole series an origin story it never had before, and it’s the part of the film that worked best for me.

The finale is another trip through the laser corridor, with final battles against Isaacs and Wesker, and the Red Queen deletes Wesker. Alicia’s last act is to give Alice her memories back, and Alice releases the anti-virus, which spreads across the world and kills off the undead. She should die too, since she’s carrying the T-virus, but she survives and rides off on a motorbike with a lot of the world still left to clear. So I do think it closes the story, and I’m happy to take it that way.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5. It wasn’t as good as some of the others in the series, but it did finally end the story, or at least I think it did. I liked how they tried to explain the Red Queen and Alice, and I’d definitely have wanted to see the battle for Washington that the last movie ended on. If you’ve followed Alice this far, it’s worth seeing it through to the end.

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MoviesTelevision

Ash vs Evil Dead – Bound in Flesh/ The Dark One

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The episodes ‘Bound in Flesh’ and ‘The Dark One’ also take place at the haunted cabin, so I’m sure all the Ghostbeaters out there got their fill this season.

Ash vs evil dead

At the start of ‘Bound in Flesh’ was a great moment with Pablo & Kelly trying to tell Ash apart from his evil twin. They are then side-tracked when Pablo & Kelly have to divert hikers away from the cabin, where they are confronted by Amanda who has been reanimated by dark forces. Her scene as a Deadite was likely the funniest moment in the show so far. They are saved from Amanda by Ruby who makes her entrance with a surprising acrobatic stunt. Ruby confronts Ash and insists that the only was to stop the dark forces is by performing a ritual to dismantle the Necronomicon, leading to a big twist in events. Ruby then reveals her true sinister intentions.

Ash vs evil dead

The episode ‘The Dark One’ begins with the cabin erupting with chaos. Deadite-Amanda seems to be gone from the series after she bursts into the cabin and Ash has to take her out. Ruby places Pablo under a spell and escapes into the basement with him and the Necronomicon. Ash and Kelly are determined to rescue Pablo, but the dark forces only allow Ash into the basement. The fruit cellar is just as faithful in design as the rest of the cabin. Ash has a really great moment here, dispatching a Deadite with the boom-stick and providing his best one-liner this season. He finds Ruby in the back room, forcing Pablo to help her summon creatures from the Necronomicon.

Ash vs evil dead

Ash initially seems to get the upper-hand, but with Pablo & Kelly’s lives at steak, he agrees to a compromise with Ruby. The season soon ends here. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that Ash certainly has his priorities in mind when he asks Ruby to include gas money in addition to their deal.

Ash vs evil dead

The first season gave me just what I wanted to see from this series. I can’t think of any jokes that didn’t hit their mark, even their groaningly lame group name, ‘The Ghostbeaters’, has grown to please fans. The creepy moments are genuinely effective and serve well to establish the horror elements. I’m still in disbelief that this show was made, if it had to stop right here I’d still be happy with what i got, because I had to see the show to believe it was for real. Bruce Campbell is immensely entertaining, I love the mystery that continues to surround the Necronomicon and the great humour you could only get from Bruce Campbell and The Evil Dead together. My reviews are pretty low on spoilers, so I hope some of you decide to check it out & enjoy. Hail to the king, baby!

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MoviesTelevision

Ash vs Evil Dead – Ashes to Ashes review

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Last Saturday’s episode was a blast from the past, Ash and the crew revisit the legendary haunted cabin from The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 movies. Also having enjoyed watching The Force Awakens on Friday, this was just an overload of everything I love. What a great weekend for entertainment.

The show’s overall pacing made getting to this point really exciting, although I’m surprised we’re here at the cabin already in the first season. The design of the cabin is spot on, every little detail from the original setting is here. The exterior, interior and the work-shed are nearly exactly how the setting looked in the Evil Dead movies. From the placing of shelves, to the clock on the wall and the as yet unvisited door to the fruit cellar.

Evil dead cabin

This episode also features the first appearance of Evil Ash, Ash Williams’ evil twin. Evil Ash appeared almost out of nowhere and it wasn’t obvious that he had stepped into Ash’s place. His dialogue was still typical of Ash, but with a sinister edge. Only after some time does Amanda realize, however, that she isn’t dealing with the Ash that she knows. Obscurous Lupa & Phelous noted in their podcast review of this episode that Evil Ash’s scenes may have been more effective and frightening if he spoke a little less, leaving some moments of brooding silence. I think that silence would have made it too obvious to determine that it wasn’t the real Ash. He’s always fast talking, so the dialogue served to keep me guessing about what was happening with Ash’s personality.

Evil dead tape-recorder

Unexpectedly, Amanda dies in this episode, much to the disappointment of myself and other fans. She actually had a unique experience with the forces of the Necronomicon in the first episode, but she really could have used some more development. If history is any indication in this series, however, people who die in that cabin don’t stay dead for very long, so I’m fairly sure we’ll be seeing her again in a whole new way.

Evil dead cabin ext

Ash’s girlfriend, Linda from Evil Dead 2, appears in the episode. She has a scene where Ash is tormented by her ghost, another great moment in the series so far. Evil Dead has been a bit silly so far, but the attitude in this episode definitely seems to be turning in a new direction. Silliness aside though, each episode has great moments, but I feel that there’s a lot of moments that lack relevance to the series progression. On the other hand, Bruce Campbell is so entertaining as Ash Williams that it really doesn’t matter much to me.

This show is so much fun to watch, thank you to everyone involved in the series for breathing new life into The Evil Dead. It’s amazing.

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Movies

Ash vs Evil Dead, Episode 1

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The Evil Dead series is one I’m always coming back to, I find that the original 1981 movie is one of those rare titles that actually gets better each time I watch it. Needless to say for anyone who follows the series, with the exception of the Evil Dead video games, it has been entirely too long since Bruce Campbell portrayed the character of Ash Williams. When Sam Rami cancelled Evil Dead 4 to work on Spider-Man, I had given up all hope of seeing Bruce pick up the role again. I figured the Evil Dead game, Regeneration, would be the closest thing to Evil Dead 4 we’d ever get.

Almost as soon as this new show starts, however, it feels like no time has passed at all. Ash is back, albeit quite a bit older. His character seems to have developed a bit since his portrayal in Army of Darkness, but obviously, still retaining his smug, smart-mouth attitude we all love.

When I first heard about this show I was concerned that Bruce Campbell may not have the energy to effectively play Ash anymore and I didn’t want the quality to suffer. The show’s trailers made me more optimistic, but almost as soon as he was on the screen I was sure that Bruce still has the talent for the role. Ash’s character now strongly resembles the role Bruce did playing as himself in the movie ‘My Name is Bruce’.

 

The show begins in an urban setting and shows us how the forces of the Necronomicon would operate there. There are a few over-the-top moments that would only ever work in an Evil Dead story, some of which left me really surprised. The soundtrack has a lot of classic rock and pieces that seems like they’re taken straight from Army of Darkness. The production quality is top-notch and the practical special effects are stunning. The CGI effects are used well and seems mostly reserved for things that can’t be done otherwise. Surprisingly, the CGI effects serves to occasionally capture some of the zaniness this series is know for, but not perfectly.

Ash currently has two co-stars that accompany him, named Pablo and Kelly. Another character with a lot of screen-time is Amanda, who has a terrifying encounter with the dark forces. These supporting roles aren’t very developed yet, but I’m sure the series will deliver that in the weeks to come.

Personally, I can’t wait to see what lies ahead for this show. It has an excellent atmosphere, special effects and fits in perfectly with Evil Dead 1, 2 and Army of Darkness. What more can I say? The king is back and this show is… groovy.

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Resident Evil: Retribution theatrical poster
MoviesSciFi

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012): A Facility Full of Familiar Faces

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I’d give Resident Evil Retribution a 2.5 or a 3, probably only a 2.5 if I’m being straight about it. There are some good action sequences in it, and it’s good to see some favourite faces back again, but it feels to me like nothing really happened in this one. After the way Afterlife ended, with Jill’s gunships coming over the horizon and a promise of a big fight, I was hoping the fifth film would take the story somewhere. Instead it mostly gets Alice back to where she was at the start of the last film, powers and all, and that’s about it.

It opens with the fight on the Arcadia deck played backwards in slow motion, which is a neat way to catch you up, and then Jill’s gunships hit the ship and Alice goes into the sea. She wakes up in a suburban house with a husband and a deaf daughter called Becky just as an outbreak begins, dies, and wakes up again in an Umbrella cell. That’s where the film really starts. She’s being held in a huge base under the ice in Kamchatka, in Russia, and the rest of the movie is her trying to get out of it.

A facility full of familiar faces

The base is full of life-size simulations of cities, Tokyo, New York, Moscow and a suburb, which Umbrella uses to test outbreaks and sell its bioweapons. It’s mostly a way to bring the old faces back, because everyone in the simulations is a clone. That’s how Rain turns up again, along with Carlos and One from the first film, and it was good to see them. It’s a way to let characters who’d been killed off come back, even if it’s a bit of a cheat, and the film plays with the idea that one person can turn up more than once.

The Red Queen is running Umbrella now and is trying to wipe out humanity. Wesker has turned against her and sends Ada Wong to break Alice out, and he sends a team from outside too, including Leon Kennedy, Barry Burton and Luther from the last film, to meet her before the place floods. Ada Wong, Leon and Barry are all characters from the games, and it was good to have them turn up. Jill is back as well, but as a villain, mind-controlled with the scarab on her chest, and she’s the one who ends up fighting Alice until the scarab gets torn off.

Alice and Ada Wong standing side by side in a red and white room
Alice and Ada Wong standing side by side in a red and white room

Good action, not much story

The action is good. There’s a Tokyo street full of the dead, a clone of Rain with powers, zombies on motorbikes firing machine guns in Moscow, and a giant Licker out on the ice, and there are some really good sequences in there. The sets, from the ice to the simulated cities, give it a bigger look than the previous ones. It’s an easy film to watch if you’re in it for the action, and the fights don’t let up for long.

But that’s where my problem comes in. Alice escapes, gets her powers back and ends up in a similar spot to where the last film began, and basically we could have skipped both this film and the last one. It feels like two films’ worth of running in place. The simulations are a fun idea, but they’re a setting for fights and cameos, and the plot barely moves the series on.

Alice as a mom, and that ending

I didn’t really care for Alice as a mom, either. She finds a clone of Becky in the facility and takes her along for the rest of the film, and Alice spends a lot of time playing mother to her. It didn’t work for me. It felt like a detour, and it slowed the film down whenever it came up.

What did work was the ending. At the White House, which is now humanity’s last fortress, Wesker gives Alice her powers back and tells her it’s humanity’s last stand. Then the camera pulls out over hordes of the dead and flying monsters closing in on the building. That was cool, and it’s the one moment in the film that felt like the story had finally moved.

Rating: 2.5 to 3 out of 5. Some good action and it was great to see familiar faces again, but nothing much happens and Alice as a mom didn’t land for me. The White House ending with the zombie hordes was cool, and it’s the part I’d point people to. It’s a film for people who are already along for the whole ride.

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the god complex praise him
Doctor WhoTelevision

The God Complex: Praise Him

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

There’s a particular kind of Doctor Who episode that starts as a haunted-house runaround and ends up quietly dismantling the show’s central premise. “The God Complex” is one of those. It has a hotel, a maze, a monster and a body count, and by the end it has made a serious and rather uncomfortable case that travelling with the Doctor is a form of worship, and that worship is what gets people killed. It’s one of the creepiest hours the show had produced to that point, though the creepiness isn’t really what it’s for. It is also the episode where he takes Amy and Rory home, and that is not a coincidence.

The hotel with a room for everybody

The setting is a shabby, endless 1980s hotel of swirling carpet, brass fittings, muzak and framed prints of the dead hanging in the lobby, and every room in it contains one person’s worst fear. It’s a superb concept, cheaply and brilliantly executed. Nick Hurran shoots the corridors with the same restless, off-kilter grammar he brought to The Girl Who Waited, all canted angles and hard cuts, and the rooms are a parade of small, specific, deeply personal horrors: a sad clown, a gorilla, a jilted bride, a row of ventriloquist dummies laughing in an empty function suite. Nothing cosmic. Nothing that requires explanation. Just the things individual people cannot look at. The rule is what makes it frightening, because once you find your room and see your fear, something in you turns over, and then you start saying praise him in a flat contented voice and walk off down the corridor to meet the Minotaur, and you are grateful.

image

The guests are a good crowd, and Rita is the best of them. Amara Karan plays a medical student with an unflappable manner, a genuinely quick mind, and no interest whatsoever in being impressed by the man with the screwdriver. She works out the hotel’s logic roughly in parallel with him, she organises the survivors, and she’s funny, dry and entirely unbothered by the Doctor’s charm. When he tells her, only half joking, that she’s fired, the joke lands because everyone in the scene understands he’s been auditioning her. He does actually offer, in the end. She declines to be saved on his terms, because by then she’s been converted, and she asks him as a kindness to let her go somewhere he can’t watch. She wants to keep her dignity, and the one thing she is certain of is that his need to save her isn’t about her.

Killing Rita is the episode’s most deliberate cruelty. She’s the most obviously companion-shaped guest star the show has produced in years, and the story removes her specifically to demonstrate that being brilliant and brave in the Doctor’s vicinity is not a survival trait. It stings, and it’s meant to. Gibbis, by contrast, survives everything. A mole-faced bureaucrat from Tivoli, the most invaded planet in the galaxy, whose national anthem is reportedly Glory to [insert name here], he has made cowardice into a civic religion, will betray anyone within about four seconds, and comes through without a scratch. It plays as comedy for two acts and then curdles. The universe is not, it turns out, arranged so the brave ones come home.

Not fear, faith

The turn is excellent, because the creature isn’t eating fear at all. It feeds on faith. Fear is just the crowbar: put someone in front of the thing they cannot bear, and they reach for whatever they actually believe in, and that is the meal. Rita has her religion. Howie has his conspiracies. Joe has his luck. The room doesn’t create the belief, it exposes it, which is a much nastier idea than a monster that simply wants you frightened.

The Doctor finds his own door, too. Room eleven. He opens it, the cloister bell begins to toll somewhere inside, and he looks at whatever is in there and says, with a tired little laugh, of course. Who else? The camera never goes past his shoulder. We are not shown it, and the episode is quite right not to show it, because every answer the audience supplies is worse than anything a set dresser could have built. It’s a superb piece of withholding in an hour otherwise built on making fears explicit, and the restraint is what makes the scene stick.

Which raises the question the episode has been walking towards from the start, and it doesn’t flinch: what does Amy Pond believe in? Her room is number seven, and it contains a little girl in a coat sitting on a suitcase in a hallway, waiting for a raggedy man to come back, the same child who waited in The Eleventh Hour and who has apparently never entirely stopped. Amy’s faith isn’t in a god or a system. It’s in him. It always has been, since she was seven, and the hotel has known it since she walked in. So he breaks it. He sits her down and tells her, deliberately and coldly, that he took her with him because he was vain and lonely and wanted to be adored, that he isn’t a hero and never was, that he is a madman with a box who has got a great many better people than her killed. Amy Williams, it’s time to stop waiting. Matt Smith plays it as an act of demolition that costs him everything, Karen Gillan plays the moment the belief actually goes out, and the creature, cut off from its food, dies on the floor of a fake hotel room.

The keys and the car

Its last words are the sting. The Minotaur is an ancient thing, related to the Nimon, kept alive for centuries by an automated prison that never stopped feeding it, and translated, what it says is that it is glad to die: an old creature drenched in the blood of the innocent, drifting through an endless shifting maze, for whom death would be a mercy. The Doctor points out that it isn’t talking about itself. He’s right, and nobody in the room argues with him.

So he takes them home. A house, a set of keys, and the red E-Type Jaguar Rory has always wanted, parked at the kerb. He doesn’t make a speech about it. He explains, more or less honestly, that he knows how this ends, that he has seen what happens to the people who keep saying yes to him, and that he would rather they were bored and alive than remarkable and dead. Amy lets him go without a fight, which is the saddest part of the whole thing. The girl on the suitcase would have chased the box down the street. This woman stands in a doorway and says goodbye properly, because he’s just taken the thing that would have made her run.

What it leaves behind is a hotel of specific fears, sad clowns and dummies and a gorilla, no cosmic horror required, just the exact wrong door for each person. It leaves the best conceptual turn of the season, a monster that doesn’t want you frightened so much as certain. It leaves Rita, the most companion-shaped guest star in years, killed to prove that being excellent near the Doctor doesn’t save you. It leaves room seven, and the fact that Amy’s faith was never in a religion but in a raggedy man who said he’d be back in five minutes and took twelve years. And it leaves the keys and the car, because he breaks her belief in him and then goes before it can grow back, which doesn’t feel like a rescue so much as a man cutting his losses.

Rating: 4/5. Sharp, ruthless about its own show, and beautifully directed, with an idea at the centre good enough to justify the entire hotel. The guest cast is uneven, since Howie and Joe are functional rather than felt, and the automated-prison explanation is a touch tidy for something this suggestive. But the closing twenty minutes are as brave as this show gets, and the goodbye is devastating precisely because nobody shouts. Every room has somebody’s name on it, and behind the door is the thing you’d fall back on. He knew which one was hers. He’d known for years.

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