Forktoss fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Aug 20, 2015

• Continuity. Pat first appeared in The Horror of Glam Rock, Lucie's Aunt from a time when she was the hip young musician trying to make it in the industry, long before Lucie was born. In that story, Lucie unfortunately lets slip that Pat never made it, that she lived a quiet and unremarkable life and that none of her dreams came true. It was an oddly downbeat note for a one-off character with such a close connection to Lucie, so her return in this story works in a couple of different ways. First, it allows us to bypass the "getting to know you" stage with a new character because we're already familiar with Pat (if we listened to season one). Secondly, it raises questions - if Pat never made anything of her life and lived out a pleasant if utterly boring life.... then how come she's currently running a successful B&B in the Lake District with a former folk music star and apparently a reasonable success both personally and professionally? This is the initial mystery of the piece, and it is aided by the pre-existing tension between the characters - Pat and Lucie know each other from their shared experience in the previous story, but Lucie is the niece that hasn't been born yet, and this Auntie Pat is a complete stranger in comparison to the one Lucie knows. Their connection feels false to them, they have a familial bond that doesn't yet exist, and Pat in particular highly distrusts their disruptive presence. That underlying sense of,"Something isn't quite right here" tension permeates the entire story, and I'd argue this a good thing.
  
  
• Communication. As the title so clearly gives away, there is a Zygon in this story. When the Doctor discovers that Trevor is not human, he immediately moves to inform Pat of the danger she is in.... and discovers that she wasn't paying lip-service to the idea of open communication in marriage. She is completely aware of Trevor's true self and rather blase about it, judging him purely by his character rather than his species. It is a mostly refreshing take on things, normally even in the most positive portrayal you'd have the alien not tell the truth to their partner about being an alien to "protect them" or because they were scared of being rejected. Trevor and Pat turn out to be exactly what they seemed to be - a happily married couple who know each other very well and are entirely comfortable with each other warts (and suckers) and all. When the Doctor is incredulous about this, Pat's non-plussed reminder that she once spent the night in a gas station being attacked by otherworldly creatures precludes her being surprised by the revelation of alien lifeforms being among us is pretty great.
  
  
• Sheridan Smith gets to stretch her range. Lucie by this point is a well established character, but like in the otherwise disappointing Skull of Sobek, she gets to play around within the confines of this role a bit in this story. Investigating Trevor's old business associates, she runs afoul of, of course, an alien plot and gets abducted. Replaced by an imposter, Smith gets to play Lucie as portrayed by somebody who knows everything about her but has to fake the personality/character. So you get a (deliberately) awkwardly paced manner of speech, of little pauses and hesitations as she reviews what she knows and attempts to maintain the pretence of being somebody she is not. There are little slip-ups and mistakes, she knows things she shouldn't, reacts in ways that are odd to those who know her (only really the Doctor, in this case) and her idea of being aggressive/no-nonsense is completely different from the way the real Lucie does the same thing. There are problems, but they're mostly with the writing as opposed to the performance, and for the actor it must have been nice to get to play around a bit with the portrayal of a by now very familiar character.
  

• The fake Lucie. Despite the fact I think it's a neat thing for the actual actor to get to change up the way she portrays her character, the writing lets the side down. Fake Lucie is too shrill, too easily lets drop knowledge she shouldn't have or ask deeply suspicious questions. Even with the listener having the knowledge that she is a fake, it beggars belief that the Doctor wouldn't notice something was up with Lucie and put 2+2 together, especially since he is entirely aware there are Zygons about. It seems so obvious that I ran with the assumption that the Doctor figured it out almost immediately and just played along to see what happened next, but late in the story when he DOES expose her as a fake, he makes it clear that he has only just figured this out. The less than impressive writing makes the character look dumb, easy to say when we have access to explicit information that he doesn't, but the Doctor is supposed to be smarter than that.
  
  
• Trevor's associates. The former colleagues of Trevor are pretty poorly written and their performances are nothing to write home about. You can only do so much with the material given anyway, and while I don't think Paul Magrs is a bad writer, nothing of his I have heard so far has ever managed to get itself about "mostly okay, I guess" status. The trio of villains are campy, but not campy enough, and sadly a minor plot point that seems to be pointing towards at least one of them developing "human" feelings for the other never really goes anywhere, though it would have been a nice parallel/contrast with Trevor and Pat's relationship. They just kind of hang around being sibilant and discussing their evil plans for evil, which makes them feel one-dimensional and not a little pathetic. This may have been the intended effect, but in that case it was perhaps too successful, as they are tiresome, annoying to listen to, and hardly feel like a threat at all no matter how much the story attempts to up the stakes.
  
  
• The ending. Though I believe it was intended to be sweet/a tribute, I was pretty appalled by the ending to this story. It answers questions that attempt to reconcile the Pat we've seen in this story and the previous with the one Lucie grew up knowing, and though it is successful in this regard it also pretty goddamn horrific in how it is done. It is a disservice to the person it intends to pay tribute too, and effectively negates them entirely and turns the entire thing around to being all about the other character entirely, about their thoughts and feelings, their grief, the impact events had on THEIR lives. That's not the intention at all, in fact it is put together to suggest it is the very opposite, that it is a selfless act and a mark of atonement, a suffering in tribute to the memory of somebody else. But for me the execution is handled very poorly, and with only a little rewriting it could have been handled more tactfully and perhaps been more palatable.
  

Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Aug 21, 2015

Jerusalem fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Aug 21, 2015

Psybro fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Aug 21, 2015