So, what did you think of the Doctor Who Season 9’s second two-part story?
> Buy Season 9 on DVD on Amazon.
> Buy Season 9 on Blu-ray on Amazon.
Let’s take a look at the best and worst bits of Toby Whithouse’s ‘Under the Lake’ and ‘Before the Flood’…
Hits
The Fisher King
Given that it contains so many hallmarks of a classic Doctor Who serial, ‘Under the Lake’ and ’Before the Flood’ might have been forgiven for featuring a characteristically crappy rubber monster in the vein of the Myrka or the Mara. Happily, the looming, labia-faced Fisher King was splendidly realised: an organic General Grievous voiced by Darth Maul himself.
Sign of the times
Laudable though it is to include deafness without patronising the hard-of-hearing characters or making their condition an unnecessary part of the story, it’s infuriating when films and TV shows feature inconsistent sign language. Four Weddings and a Funeral is a prime example: all too often David Bower is included in conversations, only for Hugh Grant to stop signing for him halfway through.
Happily, Doctor Who avoids falling into the same trap. Lunn signs everything for Cass without missing a word.
Doubleback
Whether it’s Harry Potter and his friends revisiting the execution of Buckbeak in The Prisoner of Azkaban or Marty McFly clambering through the rigging above a stage where another Marty is playing ‘Johnny B Goode’ in Back to the Future Part II, there’s inevitably a thrill at seeing characters travelling into their own past and watching scenes from an alternate point of view.
It’s no different with the Doctor and Bennett reliving thirty minutes of 1980 shortly after experiencing it the first time round, particularly as – despite the Doctor’s subsequent lies to the Fisher King – it just about adheres to Novikov’s self-consistency principle and history isn’t really changed.
Beethoven’s Fifth
Whether it was the inspiration for the time travel resolution to the plot or a desperate, last gasp way of trying to explain it, the Doctor’s straight-to-camera monologue at the start of ‘Before the Flood’ is enthralling and faintly menacing – and the way the distorted electric guitar chords of Beethoven’s most famous refrain become the opening titles is the best segue into the theme music since Bonnie Langford’s F minor scream in ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’.
The Dam
… looks damn impressive. Especially when the Doctor blows it up.
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