Spoilers for those who have not seen the episode yet.
Though flawed it was certainly a massive improvement on both RTD season openers – it was genuinely tense though it got absurdly over-sentimental in the end and the tube of dead dad seemed to change hands at one point (not the Doctor holding it).
The Doc and Ruby were somehow appropriately dressed without knowing what planet they were on or that there was even a war going on until the Doctor stepped on the mine. He stood like a stork for an absurdly long time. I can’t stand on one leg for a minute without wobbling. Ruby told to watch where she stepped seemed to stare right ahead of herself most of the time she walked to the Doctor, and everyone scrambled willy nilly round the cliff top and base regardless of the obvious mine threat.
Lots of valid digs at capitalism, the arms race and religion, though The Doctor both dissing faith and encouraging it was inconsistent. Obi-Wan Dad went off to tell the bishop they were fighting nothing but the bishop never came back with him. The ambulances looked like they could be pushed over. So Ruby is over 4,000 years old and her snow trick looks likely to recur every episode. Yes, the kid running on a battlefield was stupid and wondered how the Christian Soldiers had named the unseen enemy they had not seen anywhere.
The stop fighting and be nice to one another moral was simplistic and given the title was Boom, we got no boom. Cue Marvin the Martian…… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9wmWZbr_wQ
The Doctor has convinced this handful of squaddies and precocious ten year old acting like she’s about five that they were fighting nothing. (That may be the worst child actor performance in anything). That needs to extend to the rest of the army as presumably the war is planetary and not localized. The small cluster saved risk being done for disobeying orders, desertion and heresy if no one takes their emperor’s new clothes claim that they are fighting nothing seriously. Also, The Doctor knows the arms traders have interfered with human activity over 200 years. Shouldn’t he be making a TARDIS call right to the heart of their operation?
NB – He has actually taken down the arms traders off-screen as he refers to their destruction in a chat with Jack Harkness in The Doctor Dances.
The dead dad is carefully packed in his transparent Pringles pack by the ambulance Susan Twist, but then just dumped on the ground rather than returned to his loved ones. Instructed by the Doctor to find a rock Ruby climbs the cliff, but it looks like the whole landscape is rock and rubble and compacted sand.
“Everywhere’s a beach in the end’. Looking forward to the tide coming in on the Moon.
Was I alone in guessing there was no enemy five minutes in?
A lot of good stuff too. The Doctor standing still for most of the episode after running round like a demented gazelle for the previous three appearances. It drew the action in, created claustrophobia and emotion for some very intense acting. The companion not following his instructions to stay back is used brilliantly here with Ruby defiantly risking her life to hand him the counterweight rather than throwing it. Ruby’s reaction to the alien sky, and later the squaddies being mesmerized by it too, as they finally see the beauty of the place after seeing only the smoke and flames of battle before.
So the Doctor exploding would take out half a planet. So far his regenerations have been after deaths that have left him intact – the idea of Time Lords as walking atom bombs is fun. Hang on, how many did The War Doctor/Daleks blow up at close quarter in the Time War footage we saw? They didn’t take Galifrey out with them.
The mines migrate is the explanation of why the blind guy steps on one in a previously safe area. The whole thing with laying a minefield is that your own side has to know the safe paths round or through it or be nowhere near it once it is in place – making and buying mines that can turn up randomly anywhere is a game of Russian Roulette. Even the ruthless sellers should realise that dead buyers don’t come back to buy more – does no one ask for stats or reviews of success rates for armies using the weapons bought?
This was not the first episode in which the Doctor has stood on a landmine. He did it in Genesis Of The Daleks (Tom Baker) and again in The Tsuranga Conundrum where one detonates and renders the doctor and her (Jodie Whittaker’s) companions unconscious without killing or maiming any of them.
Photos taken by me.
Arthur Chappell
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