Ahh, 1983. M*A*S*H, the moonwalk, ‘Mawdryn Undead’. Oh, and Mutually Assured Destruction. Good times.
But a bad time for The Doctor and Clara to land aboard a stricken Russian nuclear submarine. At the helm is Liam Cunningham, being all authoritarian and troubled, just as he was in BBC One’s short-lived space oddity Outcasts; while in the hold is David Warner, toting naught but a Walkman and a loveable grandfatherly nature.
You know that feeling you got as a child when you had to sing a song in front of the whole school? Well, they’ve gone and made a Doctor Who episode about it.
It’s a truism that Doctor Who inspires playground re-enactment; but rarely has an episode so obviously been designed with Monday morning playtime in mind. So much of the story is imitable: from the alien who barks like a dog to the fact that the monster is defeated with an autumn leaf. A psychically-charged, totemic sort of leaf, but a leaf nonetheless.
While the bodies have been steadily piling up over the course of this season (particularly in last week’s episode), ‘Separate Paths’ is the first episode that really hammers home just how damned the central characters of Spartacus are.
‘Every great magic trick consists of three parts’, says Michael Caine in Christopher Nolan’s gaslight and handsomeness extravaganza The Prestige. Someone forgot to pass the message on to Jonathan Creek.
Ah, Westeros. It’s good to be back.
This first slice of Season 3 is primarily an establishing episode, settling some loose ends from the previous season’s epic climax, while setting up some new threads for the many characters. With so many locations, characters and plots, it’s inevitable that at certain points the show has to slow down and stage a piece-moving episode like this, but Game of Thrones still makes them hugely enjoyable.
Well, we can probably now discount Jack Marshall as a suspect. Can’t we?
That’s the thing about Broadchurch: to be certain of anything is to risk being utterly wrong. It’s the dilemma the townspeople face this week as their collective gaze turns on a quiet old man who looks a lot like William Hartnell. The murder of Danny Latimer has stirred the sands of the Jurassic Coast, uncovering not only evidence like high tar cigarettes, but also events that some would rather stay buried.
You’ll have noticed this already, but In the Flesh has not been about zombies. It’s been a kitchen sink drama, disguised by rotting flesh. The pale skin and the mutated eyes designed to attract your attention as, underneath, the thoroughly human message of the show has played out: the human capacity for love and forgiveness. It just so happens that the restless dead make a great allegory for laying things to rest.
Songs. Since the Doctor returned in 2005 they’ve formed a quiet coda in the background of his lives, and not simply because of composer Murray Gold’s bombastic injection of sound. ‘I sang a song and the Daleks ran away’, Nine told Rose. ‘Your song is ending soon’, the Ood warned Ten, and sang him to sleep. And Eleven? Well, he’s played around a lot with a certain Melody lately.
For an episode which did so much to ring in the new, there was an awful lot that was familiar about ‘The Bells of Saint John’.
Suffolk’s spookiest cottage ends its mysterious journey through time, remorse and fashion as Lightfields comes to its inevitable conclusion in the fifth episode. But the finale ends on a more subdued and quiet note than expected.