This episode couldn't have annoyed me more if it had been intentional. The cast is great and the monsters look really cool, but the story is garbage. Nothing makes sense, the dialogue is incredibly annoying, and even the bits that could have worked don't because they take full advantage of every lazy shortcut instead of bothering to come up with plausible reasons for anything to happen.
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| Great costumes too. |
The crew arrive, by accident (because I guess the Doctor's back to not being able to control the TARDIS properly this week), at a witch trial. The Doctor says they can't interfere moments before interfering. I mean, that's pretty standard by now, but it's not even played as a joke, it's just a thing she does. Then she uses the psychic paper (and you know how I feel about that) to convince the local landowner (the woman in the fancy hat pictured above) that she's the Witchfinder General.
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| Also she killed all the horses for being satanic, which makes no sense in the context of the episode's big reveal. |
Then King James shows up. And immediately I'm wondering how the hell King James can just be wandering the countryside alone without throwing the upper echelons of society into chaos, but the show never addresses this. I thought it might be a hint that he's actually an impostor, but nope, we're just expected to not notice that him being here is utterly implausible.
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| Alan Cumming is great though. |
Then zombies appear and try to hunt down the landowner, because they (the bodies) and she are infected with some aliens who can control dead bodies for some reason and just a whole lot of magical bullshit happens. I've got no problem with magic in TV shows, but in this show they consistently insist that there is no magic. But rather than showing how advanced technology could appear to be magical (the Doctor even quotes Clarke at one point) they just have the characters act like it's obvious. The Doctor's seem exasperated by the locals' assumption that the obviously magical things are really magic and just keep insisting that it's alien technology, like as though that's a much more obvious and reasonable explanation.
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| Alien-mud zombies. Not magic though, that would be absurd. |
And the Doctor will not stop waving her magic wand around even though she's in the middle of a literal witch-hunt, and (after an implausibly long time) she is eventually accused of being a witch. And then continues to act exactly like a witch. It's like she's trying to get killed. And she only manages to survive by escaping from her chains while underwater like Houdini - a skill she apparently has but which has never been mentioned before and, I'm guessing, isn't going to come up ever again because it was just written into this scene by an incredibly lazy writer.
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| Most of that chain doesn't actually seem to serve any purpose. |
Then the aliens possess the landowner and reveal their plan to also possess King James for reasons that weren't at all clear. Like, I think they want to take over the world as a stepping stone toward getting back at whoever imprisoned them, but how turning the king of England into a weird grey monster would help with that is a mystery. Anyway, they're defeated by attacking them with flaming sticks taken from the magic tree they were imprisoned under. The idea that they're demons actually fits the available evidence far better than the Doctor's explanation. This whole story would fit far better into a show like Supernatural where you can just admit that the magic really is magic.
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| The alien leader looks pretty cool. |
And then, having put the aliens back into their eternal prison (which I've got to say doesn't seem like a great solution, given how easily they got out this time), the Doctor and her friends leave. And King James is now a good guy, I guess, because he ended up siding with them against monsters who were trying to kill him.
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| Also King James was in disguise at the start for no reason. |
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