Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Mar 9, 2016

Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Mar 9, 2016

• Tying up loose ends. The first episode of season 4 of the 8th Doctor Adventures, this story does a pretty good job of tying up some loose ends from across the previous 3 seasons and seemingly wrapping up Lucie Miller's time with the Doctor, bringing her "time" with him rather neatly full circle. A recurring character from the first two seasons was Lucie's Auntie Pat, Lucie's hip aunt who never married or really seemed to move on with her life or go anywhere or do anything. Over time we learned the reasons for her shift from a free-wheeling wannabe musician who could never stay in one place for long to a fun but sedentary recluse - the real Pat died during another adventure, replaced by her Zygon husband who attempted to pay tribute to her (and keep Lucie's timeline intact) by taking on her form permanently and living the rest of his life as Pat. This decision never really sat well with me, especially the Doctor's decision not to tell Lucie the truth, and despite the clear intent to make this a selfless act of love, it came across as kind of crass, short-sighted and even somewhat disrespectful to me. So I was quite pleased that this story actually dealt with the very real consequences of this decision, for "Pat", for the Doctor, and especially for Lucie. By the end of the story, I felt everything had been tied up strongly, and that it served well to mark a breaking point for Lucie and the Doctor. Quite nicely, it also comes nearly full circle back to the first EDA, as Lucie discovers the Doctor has brought her home for Christmas a year too early, meaning that she'll need to spend a few months traveling/laying low before returning to her life shortly after the Time Lords took her out of it, meaning for her family there's no need for explanations of where she has been/what she has been up to.
  
  
• The Anti-Lidster ending. Towards the end of the story, the bad guy is left alone with another character and slowly kills them while cackling evilly about how he is now going to do all these evil things, and that nobody (including the not-present Doctor) will be any the wiser. It's cruel, sadistic and brutally handled.... and then a few moments later we learn that the victim was actually playing the bad guy all along, that the Doctor isn't an idiot and has figured everything out ahead of time and taken steps to resolve it, and we don't get some pointless bit of unresolved misery-porn for its own sake.
  
  
• Lucie Miller. As the apparent swansong for Lucie Miller, it's a strong goodbye. Sheridan Smith is in fine form, having developed strongly in her performance (helped by improved writing/a better understanding of her character) so that her brash, loud overconfidence now seems earned rather than a mask for being in over her head or poor writing trying to shortcut established chemistry between her and Paul McGann. During the scene where she is in a coma and talking with the "porter", she shines strongly, as she takes in his big sales pitch and comes up with an admirable if completely inaccurate take on what is going on. Following that, the (half-heard) revelation of "Pat" and the Doctor's secret has a massive impact on her, but even though her initial reaction is disbelief followed by fury, by the time she is reunited with the Doctor she has already dealt with the whole thing in a far more adult way than you would normally expect from most pieces of media. Her decision to part way with the Doctor comes across as carefully thought through and rather mature - she knows that the Doctor acted in her best interests, knows that he was well intentioned, but his actions have changed the way she looks at him and that isn't something she wants to happen. She makes the decision to leave not out of some momentary spite or later-regretted spur-of-the-moment decision, but as the result of careful deliberation and a desire to maintain her mental image of the Doctor. It's a bittersweet parting, but not necessarily a sad one (though Sheridan Smith does admit to getting a bit weepy while recording her lines ).
  

• The comic-relief. There's a drunk Santa Claus who features heavily in the story and he's... well he's just a bad character. He doesn't really seem to serve any purpose whatsoever, and his oft-repeated "IT'S CHRISTMASSSSSS" it meant to come across as a running joke and instead it's just rather annoying. Towards the end there is a moment where he acts as the voice of clarity who cuts through the bullshit and shows the Doctor and Pat the error of their ways, but it feels completely unearned and really comes out of nowhere. The rather naff happy ending where he gets a new job working at the hospital (along with the bizarrely Russian-accented receptionist) feels like an attempt to play off the idea of this as a Christmas Special. The special features admit that they were going for the same Christmas Special feel that the Revival had become known for (particularly in the RTD era) but it really doesn't work very well here.
  
  
• "Zynog". The bad guy is a "Zynog", a criminal Zygon punished by being locked into one form only who can only take on a new form by stealing the body of a braindead human. I don't know if this is a creation of Big Finish or something from one of the New Adventures books or not... but it's awful. Just the name alone is so stupid, like if there was a human criminal who had his tongue cut out and from that point forward was called a Hunam or something. They wanted another Zygon but not one that could shapeshift but could telepathically enter people's minds, so up pops the "Zynog" and the whole thing just feels silly.
  
  
• The season-opener. This episode opens this "season" of the Eighth Doctor Adventures but it feels like an ending, something that wraps up the previous three seasons so things can start up fresh and new. There really wasn't anywhere this could fit in with the season-arc they were trying to tell last season though, so it takes up the first episode of this one instead. As a result, the following episode has to set the scene for the rest of the season, and it seems to me that this does it a disservice and starts it on a back foot. At least it wasn't as bad as series 7 where the first half was all about Amy and Rory and then Clara's story got jammed into the back half.
  

GonSmithe fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Mar 9, 2016