Like I said last time, this episode was better than the first one. I kind of hoped they weren't going to find the TARDIS so quickly, because a few episodes of them hitching rides to various places, following its trail, could have been pretty entertaining and would have been a good excuse for the new crew to stick around. A better excuse than "you know how sometimes the Doctor can't pilot the TARDIS accurately? Yeah, that."
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| This is Angstrom. She's the nice one. |
You may recall that the previous episode ended with them floating in space. Obviously they get picked up right away, because otherwise the show would be over. The boys get picked up by a girl and the girls get picked up by a boy, but they all get together pretty soon anyway and they don't waste any time going "oh no, our friends must be dead because they're not here".
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| This is Epzo. He's the mean one. |
The two pilots are involved in a race in which one person is eliminated at each stage. There being only two of them left, this is the final stage and both their ships are now out of comission, having given their all to reach this planet. Whichever one of them wins will be transported off the planet and become fabulously wealthy. The loser will remain behind and die.
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| This is the guy in charge of the whole thing. He gives absolutely no fucks about the Doctor and her friends. |
Their destination is "the ghost monument", a mysterious object that appears for one day every thousand years. I think it was a thousand years? Might have been a hundred. Way too long to just wait for it to come back again anyway. The Doctor immediately recognises it as the TARDIS, doing that thing where it drifts through time. So the "teleport to the TARDIS" thing almost worked.
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| Yep, that sure is the TARDIS. |
The two racers agree to work together for the time being - mostly because they're not allowed to harm or impede each other or they'll be disqualified - and so the whole group sets off together. They find a boat, which they're able to repair, and use it to cross over to some ruins. The Doctor is really curious about this planet because it clearly used to be inhabited but now is completely dead, but no one else is really that interested.
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| Epzo decides to go off on his own at this point. |
In the ruins they find some robots, which are dormant until Epzo accidentally wakes them up, at which point they immediately start trying to kill everyone. Based on the last time I watched this show I'd expect this to be the point at which the episode devolves into idiots running and shouting a lot, but that doesn't happen. This is actually more like the old Doctor Who where the monsters aren't actually very threatening and it's more talky and less actiony.
They find some underground tunnels, and the Doctor whips out her magic wand to open and shut doors despite them clearly being ordinary doors that don't need special tools to operate. It's just dumb and unnecessary. Get rid of the goddamn magic wand.
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| That's not even how you hold a wand, hasn't she seen Harry Potter? |
Down there they find some convenient exposition explaining that this planet was destroyed by war; scientists were forced to create more and more advanced weapons and they ended up killing everyone. Some of these weapons are still active on the surface (but only at night time for some reason), which is a problem because the robots are now chasing them through the tunnels.
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| Or standing around the entrance. Menacingly though. |
These weapons are sort of flying cloth things that wrap you up and crush you, and they fly around like ghosts and whisper mean things to you before they do it. They're pretty dumb, but in a fun way, so I don't have a problem with it. Anyway, they beat them in a way that makes use of things that have already been established, so it's much better than last week's ending; although if one were to nitpick, the self-lighting cigar is also pretty dumb and it could have just been a lighter.
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| Epzo was really looking forward to that cigar, too. |
Also, I understand how it's supposed to work, with the flammable gas being lighter than air, but it still seems pretty unlikely that they could survive this. It's fine though, this kind of thing happens in TV.
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| It's cool, we're totally fine down here. |
Anyway, Epzo learns the valuable lesson that cooperation is actually good and people are stronger together and all that and the two racers agree to cross the finish line together and split the prize. Ilin, the guy in charge, isn't happy about it, but he begrudgingly accepts and whisks them both away. He still doesn't give a shit about the Doctor and her friends though, so he leaves them there to die. He's pretty much the best part of the episode.
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| Winners! |
But fortunately the "ghost monument" is still due to show up at any moment, and it does so. It looks like it's not going to properly materialise for a moment but then it does and they all go inside. I'm not a fan of the new control room. I don't think I've liked any of the control rooms in the new series. I think the TARDIS control room should look like a space ship control room, glowing beehive. I also think it should be a space that the characters can spend time in, like, as a communal living space. This doesn't seem like a place anyone's going to want to be. It also doesn't look like it's easy to film in though, so I'm assuming we're not going to see much of it. Oh well. I think it's good to have regular scenes in the TARDIS to establish some baseline of normalcy for the crew, but it's not essential.
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| Blue lights = future. |
One other thing was that we got a mention of the Stenza, the aliens from the first episode, which suggests that they're going to be recurring villains. I'm not keen. I don't like season-long arcs on shows like this. I like the monster of the week format. Plus, Tim Shaw didn't really make much of an impact, so I don't really see much value in getting him back. But apparently they've said it's all going to be stand-alone episodes this season, so maybe the reference was just a red herring. Who knows?
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| Bradley Walsh is still great. |
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