Category Archives: TV/Movie Reviews
Doctor Who: Nightmare in Silver Review
One of my biggest complaints about the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who, besides the annoyingly regular deus ex machina episode endings, was that Davies ruined some of the classic Who villains. Sure, the Cybermen weren’t too badly done by but the Daleks were killed and resurrected so many times that I stopped caring about them.
And so it fell to British sci-fi writer Neil Gaiman to write the latest Cybermen episode. When handed the assignment, showrunner Steven Moffat had one simple instruction for Gaiman. His job was to make the Cybermen scary again. After watching, I’m not sure that it was mission accomplished.
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Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror Review
This week’s episode of Doctor Who was the 100th since the show’s return in 2005. While most series would celebrate that milestone, the BBC and Doctor Who boss Steven Moffat let this one pass without much fanfare. Makes sense seeing as there’s a big 50th anniversary special coming in November.
That doesn’t mean that we didn’t get a special episode of Doctor Who, even if it wasn’t billed as such. What we got was, slightly ironically, an episode that started Doctor-lite but still ended up being the best of the Clara episodes since Jenna-Louise Coleman joined the series full-time.
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Doctor Who: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS Review
Some episodes are easy to sum up in the opening tease of a review but Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS is definitely not one of those episodes. There was a mix of action, suspense, intrigue and wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey to make for a fun episode. And there was even an unofficial tour of the TARDIS to boot.
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Doctor Who – Hide Review
It’s always nice when Doctor Who does a horror episode. It sure has come a long way from an educational-ish program in the 1960s to today. I find it kind of funny that the rebooted Doctor Who does the horror episodes better than the time travelling or The Doctor doing battle with classic foes. That was definitely the case with this week’s Hide.
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Doctor Who – Cold War Review
What happens when the TARDIS acts up with one of its occasional bouts of having a mind of its own? The Doctor and Clara end up trapped on a Soviet nuclear submarine at the height of the Cold War with an old enemy who just happens to be hell-bent on destruction. Don’t you just hate it when you have a day like that?
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Doctor Who – The Rings of Akhaten Review
This week, we got our fourth Clara adventure. Well, it’s technically only her second as a proper companion. As such, she gets her first trip in the TARDIS and gets to see what life with the Doctor is really like and how he operates. Not only does changing companions allow for a change alongside the Doctor but it gives the opportunity for him to tweak some habits too. But the one thing that really didn’t change was what the format of the first off-world adventure for a new companion.
What immediately grabbed my eye was how the first adventures with both Donna and Amy seemed to have a similar visual palette and style to “The Rings of Akhaten.” Both “The Fires of Pompeii” and “The Beast Below” had a lot of red and browns dominating the sets and costumes. The sets all looked a little dirty and dusty rather than clean, futuristic sci-fi. And each had a scene in something that looked like a market.
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Doctor Who – The Bells of Saint John Review
Steven Moffat loves that little catchphrase that he wrote back in Season 3’s Blink. When Moffat writes, you get the sense that wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey will be involved at some point. (That or Weeping Angels.) With new companion Clara Oswald, we got our fair share of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey fun. There just wasn’t that same Moffat writing that we come to expect from his episodes in The Bells of Saint John.
et geekera 