Rewatching Doctor Who: Hide
Sep. 18th, 2024 06:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vivdunstanContinuing my (oh so nearly finished) Matt Smith era rewatch, and it's on to this spooky thriller.
On plus I liked the core cast. It is an extremely small cast, with just the psychic investigators Alec and Emma, and also a mysterious figure from the future. Dougray Scott and Jessica Raine are particularly good value, and help lift weaker parts of the script.
However the story feels over stretched, and probably not really more than 30 minutes of content. In particular the sections in the pocket universe are overlong and repetitive for me. And I also found the supposedly spooky scenes in the 1970s mansion repetitive after a while.
My biggest problem with the episode is when the Doctor goes off in the TARDIS, admittedly with Clara, and we don't really see what he is doing. Then he returns to the 1970s mansion, with a batch of photographs, and we get a very hand wavey scifi gobbledygook explanation of what is happening re a pocket universe. Doctor Who is always making up daft quasi scientific explanations for everything. But usually we see more of the clues on screen, and don't just get a whole info dump out of nowhere. This was not good.
On plus I really liked Clara and the TARDIS bits. When the TARDIS voice interface takes on Clara's form to speak to her I laughed out loud. And it's also a hint forward for what happens soon in "The Day of the Doctor".
I'd like to say I was more convinced by the romance between Alec and Emma. The actors tried. But I just wanted to slap them into action. And again it felt drawn out and overlong.
So some nice elements, but overall rather disappointing for me. It just needed more. And I don't mean more characters.
Oh and almost forgot to mention Matt Smith's repeated terrible mispronunciations of Metebelis III. Surely someone could have caught that. Even Steven Moffat at the table read through? Because while, yes, every Doctor is different, having this fan service callback to the Third Doctor era was jarring if it's pronounced so very differently.
On plus I liked the core cast. It is an extremely small cast, with just the psychic investigators Alec and Emma, and also a mysterious figure from the future. Dougray Scott and Jessica Raine are particularly good value, and help lift weaker parts of the script.
However the story feels over stretched, and probably not really more than 30 minutes of content. In particular the sections in the pocket universe are overlong and repetitive for me. And I also found the supposedly spooky scenes in the 1970s mansion repetitive after a while.
My biggest problem with the episode is when the Doctor goes off in the TARDIS, admittedly with Clara, and we don't really see what he is doing. Then he returns to the 1970s mansion, with a batch of photographs, and we get a very hand wavey scifi gobbledygook explanation of what is happening re a pocket universe. Doctor Who is always making up daft quasi scientific explanations for everything. But usually we see more of the clues on screen, and don't just get a whole info dump out of nowhere. This was not good.
On plus I really liked Clara and the TARDIS bits. When the TARDIS voice interface takes on Clara's form to speak to her I laughed out loud. And it's also a hint forward for what happens soon in "The Day of the Doctor".
I'd like to say I was more convinced by the romance between Alec and Emma. The actors tried. But I just wanted to slap them into action. And again it felt drawn out and overlong.
So some nice elements, but overall rather disappointing for me. It just needed more. And I don't mean more characters.
Oh and almost forgot to mention Matt Smith's repeated terrible mispronunciations of Metebelis III. Surely someone could have caught that. Even Steven Moffat at the table read through? Because while, yes, every Doctor is different, having this fan service callback to the Third Doctor era was jarring if it's pronounced so very differently.