I was prepared to write up a review of 2012's edition of what has become a much-anticipated holiday tradition: the Doctor Who Christmas special. And then showrunner/writer Steven Moffat louses it up by making everyone's job at writing about it ridiculously almost impossibly hardcore crazy difficult.
So on this side of the pond "The Snowmen" just finished transmitting on BBC America.
Good. Lord...
"The Snowmen" has done what no other Christmas special before has done: it has sent Doctor Who COMPLETELY off the rails like a highballing freight train. The lever is broken and the brakes are GONE, bay-bee!!
Halfway through the story I was already set to declare "The Snowmen" to be not only the best Christmas special we have yet seen, but to be one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. This was a Doctor (Matt Smith) we have never witnessed before in any incarnation: tired, world-weary... and dare I say apathetic? Smith has steadily been turning the Eleventh Doctor into a far darker character than we've become comfortable with. The tragic events seen in "The Angels Take Manhattan" have taken their toll on the man who was once savior of worlds.
It also didn't hurt that we got to see the return of Madame Vastra and her associate/wife Jenny, and Strax (who had such wonderful wacky and trigger-happy lines in this special that many on Twitter are demanding that he be the next companion for the Doctor).
Then there were the Snowmen: perhaps the most nightmarish and twisted villains we have seen in any Doctor Who story in recent memory. And there could have been no better actor to give them life and a voice than Ian McKellen. Richard Grant also brought a sinister presence as Doctor Simeon.
So let's get down to brass tacks: "The Snowmen" as a story all its own blew the minds of everyone watching tonight. But then there was that last half or so hinting at something else amiss.
And then came the last few minutes...
JEEBUS CRIPES CRISPIES WITH MILK AND BROCCOLI!!!
Doctor Who is now totally off the chain. And so begins the era of Jenna-Louise Coleman as Clara: perhaps more than any other companion in nigh-on fifty years of Doctor Who, set to be a major enigma in the already-enigmatic life of the Doctor.
This will go down in history as the Christmas Night that melted the gray matter of Doctor Who fans across the globe. And there will be NO end to speculation between now and when the show returns in April for the second half of the current season.
"The Snowmen" gets an unprecedented FIFTEEN Sonic Screwdrivers out of a possible five from this reviewer. Yes, it's that good.
Best. Doctor Who. Christmas. Special. Ever. Must. Watch. Again.
You're a better person than I am, because I just watched the Christmas special, and I feel some parts dragged, other parts were rushed, and overall, it simply made no sense. There again, Doctor Who doesn't make any sense half the time anyway.
ReplyDeleteI do like the new companion, mostly because she's spunky and hot. The Sontarran (sp?) was kind of funny with his over-zealousness. And, it was interesting to hear an invisible Magneto inside a snowglobe.
While I'm glad that Clara brought The Doctor out of his funk, and I wouldn't have expected otherwise, I think he still came out of his funk a little too easily. Frankly, I wanted to see him even more Scrooge-like over the loss of his beloved Amy & Rory Pond (uh, Williams).
Being the atypical, not-really-a-true-fan follower of Doctor Who, the main appeal to me in recent seasons were the Ponds (eh, Williams), and I even skipped half a season of them. So, Clara/Oswin has big shoes to fill.
This was a Christmas special: it could,be, nay, needed to be a little extra on the fun side. We got that. But we also got the Doctor totally unlike anything we've seen in this show's entire run, much less a Christmas special. What really brought him back into action was Clara, realizing that "hey this is a mystery I need to figure out!"
ReplyDeleteAnd I love the new title sequence! Finally, the Doctor's face returns to where it should be :-)