Post by Ripley on Oct 3, 2015 21:27:17 GMT -5
"I’ve really enjoyed the first two episodes of Doctor Who Series 9 so far, but it’s very hard to judge how a series is going to turn out based on its opening. Steven Moffat episodes always have a certain air of grandeur, be they in references to past milestones or setting up huge new given circumstances. But its when the other writers’ work starts coming in that I start getting really excited. Toby Whithouse is a Who veteran at this point, having written all the way back in Series 2 with the beloved episode “School Reunion”, which reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) into the continuity. He wrote “The God Complex” which I really loved, but also “A Town Called Mercy” which I did not. So, it wasn’t a given if “Under the Lake” was going to be enjoyable for me. Luckily, I dug it, and it looks like the second part will be much different, in a great way.
The setting was great. It was a nice throwaway (that will end up not being a throwaway) that the Lake in Scotland where the underwater base exists is actually a flooded former military base. That allows Whithouse to play with lost civilization tropes without it being Atlantis or something similar (since we already know there’s been about a billion of those explanations in the show). How weird for the crew to find an alien spacecraft deep under the water, huh? Why would it be there? Who could have sent it? Ooh, mysteries!
The Doctor gets to be full-on Doctor in this one, and I love that it this was one of the few times when the Doctor’s psychic paper tells everyone that he’s the Doctor and he works for UNIT. That takes a lot of the “Hey, who are you?!” out of the episode, and again hearkens back to the Third Doctor era when he could just say “I’m with UNIT” for Earthbound adventures and that’s all anyone needed. It’s also cute how O’Donnell was all starstruck..."
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The setting was great. It was a nice throwaway (that will end up not being a throwaway) that the Lake in Scotland where the underwater base exists is actually a flooded former military base. That allows Whithouse to play with lost civilization tropes without it being Atlantis or something similar (since we already know there’s been about a billion of those explanations in the show). How weird for the crew to find an alien spacecraft deep under the water, huh? Why would it be there? Who could have sent it? Ooh, mysteries!
The Doctor gets to be full-on Doctor in this one, and I love that it this was one of the few times when the Doctor’s psychic paper tells everyone that he’s the Doctor and he works for UNIT. That takes a lot of the “Hey, who are you?!” out of the episode, and again hearkens back to the Third Doctor era when he could just say “I’m with UNIT” for Earthbound adventures and that’s all anyone needed. It’s also cute how O’Donnell was all starstruck..."
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