Eight Months can feel like a long time when you’re waiting. Since Christmas that’s exactly what every Doctor Who fan has been doing, waiting with baited breath. We’d been left on the image of a new Doctor, played by an actor who has appeared twice in the Doctor Who universe before; he didn’t know who he was and we were all left waiting. So it was with great anticipation that I sat down to see a Dinosaur walking around Victorian London coughing out a very familiar looking blue box where our old friends the Victorian detective agency come across a very unfamiliar face.
From here the Doctor has had yet another bad regeneration and needs to recover (revolutionary idea, he regenerates and is just fine). However while he’s supposed to be recuperating and dressed only in a nightshirt he runs off to flirt with the time displaced T-Rex (it’s sentences like those that explain why I love this show); however before his eyes the T-Rex spontaneously combusts and the Doctor flies into detective mode asking “have there been any similar murders?” before leaping into the Thames to find out who’s behind it.
This was a solid regeneration episode, Steven Moffat likes to give a fresh Doctor a whole lot to do in their first outing and here sees Capaldi running around, falling from trees, riding horses, jumping in rivers, confusing tramps and maybe committing cold blooded murder. Meanwhile Clara’s annoyance at the Doctor abandoning her to solve the murder delves deeper into her overall fear that she’s lost the man who took her on all those adventures and changed her life. The Victorian detective agency partook in schtick... a bit too much schtick... like distracting levels that made you think this episode wouldn’t have to be an hour and a quarter long if they’d cut some of this.
The villains start out as an interesting call back to an earlier episode and have plenty of seriously creepy moments (the titular deep breath being an especially horrifying moment) but I got sick to death of the Doctor saying, hey you seem like something I saw before, it did reek a bit of self congratulation on Steven Moffat’s part and as often seems to happen in Doctor Who they made the villains indulge in the schtick, seriously a terrifying clockwork robot with no face says, in an attempt to be menacing no less, “yes, we do have a children’s menu”. Some jokes don’t need to happen.
From here the Doctor has had yet another bad regeneration and needs to recover (revolutionary idea, he regenerates and is just fine). However while he’s supposed to be recuperating and dressed only in a nightshirt he runs off to flirt with the time displaced T-Rex (it’s sentences like those that explain why I love this show); however before his eyes the T-Rex spontaneously combusts and the Doctor flies into detective mode asking “have there been any similar murders?” before leaping into the Thames to find out who’s behind it.
This was a solid regeneration episode, Steven Moffat likes to give a fresh Doctor a whole lot to do in their first outing and here sees Capaldi running around, falling from trees, riding horses, jumping in rivers, confusing tramps and maybe committing cold blooded murder. Meanwhile Clara’s annoyance at the Doctor abandoning her to solve the murder delves deeper into her overall fear that she’s lost the man who took her on all those adventures and changed her life. The Victorian detective agency partook in schtick... a bit too much schtick... like distracting levels that made you think this episode wouldn’t have to be an hour and a quarter long if they’d cut some of this.
The villains start out as an interesting call back to an earlier episode and have plenty of seriously creepy moments (the titular deep breath being an especially horrifying moment) but I got sick to death of the Doctor saying, hey you seem like something I saw before, it did reek a bit of self congratulation on Steven Moffat’s part and as often seems to happen in Doctor Who they made the villains indulge in the schtick, seriously a terrifying clockwork robot with no face says, in an attempt to be menacing no less, “yes, we do have a children’s menu”. Some jokes don’t need to happen.
So my main gripes are with too much comedy and slightly poorly handled villains, but overall? This episode did exactly what I needed it to do, it convinced me. Before the episode I was having my doubts about how Peter Capaldi would do as The Doctor, following it I can safely say that Peter Capaldi is The Doctor, he fully inhabits the role in ways that both compliment and contrast previous portrayals, I can’t wait to see his take on it grow and grow. So for all my gripes, which are fairly minor, this episode was a complete success in the one area it most needed to succeed.