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Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio (2016)
Superman returns... unfortunately
Its Christmas time again, thus we are treated to our first Doctor who episode in an entire year and... well... the word dull comes to mind. First things first this was supposed to be a Christmas story, think back to the 'Christmas invasion' where the Earth was saved by a satsuma and ended with a charming scene of the Doctor opening presents and pulling crackers or a Moffat era story like 'The snowmen' maybe not the most Christmassy episode ever but it was set at Christmas time with a Christmas themed villain, now look at this years special, which bar an opening scene had little to nothing to do with the actual holiday. The theme was "super heroes" the genre I'm sure we all associate with the winter season and not, you know, like the summer when all the major superhero movies come out. That's not exactly a bad thing and I wouldn't hold this against the show if the story was good but I'm a huge superhero fan and I've read, watched and played stories so much better than this. The show felt like a golden age comic come to life with all the nonsense plot points, technobabble and leaps in logic that were products of a shoe string budget and a system were the art was drawn before the story was written. Doctor who does not have these excuses yet still comes off like babies first Superman story. The Doctor takes a back seat in his own special only appearing to act like the whimsical madman with no room for character development, this is, I'm afraid the legacy the Moffat will leave for his era of Doctor who, the earl of Deus ex machina who only exists as a plot device to move the plot forward, never breaking for character development. This episode spends far too much time with characters who are really bland, the point of Clark Kent is that he's dull and mild mannered to contrast with the Superman persona yet so why does the show stick us with the Ghost, a character whose boring and underdeveloped with powers never defined so I never get the sense anyone is in danger because much like Sup's in the 90's Ghost could just pull out a new power from anywhere and snap his fingers till the bad guys poof away. The episode climaxes with the Ghost catching a falling space ship but we're never shown the limits of his strength so the character never seems like he's in any danger. Sadly the show takes one to many directions from the 90's when it comes to the art style, it loses the vibrant colours that were a staple of the type of stories the episode references and tries to emulate. The episode has a gray filter hanging over it and if it wasn't for the accents the show could have taken place on a mild June night in Manchester. The bad guys are all right one part face hugger, one part Krang from TMNT with the kind of plan you'd expect from a race that can build faster than light spaceships but not exist outside of jars without help. Nardol, the character that people expected to be the downfall of this episode added a sweet bit of comic relief and made the show that little bit more bearable with some genuinely funny lines and this episode gave us the first look at the new season so watch it if you've got the time but it might be worth downing an energy drink cause the dull tone and grey filter might just send you off to sleep.
Class (2016)
I won't be going back
Do you like Buffy the vampire slayer? well so does Patrick Ness as Class is pretty much a British knock off. Do you like the most basic archetypes? well so does Patrick Ness as Class contains the most boring, simple characters types we've seen in every piece of college fiction written in the past 30 years. Do you like relatable characters? No? Well good because pretty much everyone in Class is unlikable to the point where I'm not sure I want the episode to be resolved, if the villains of episode one won I really wouldn't care. Our "hero" is a somehow simultaneously an alien prince slave owner and the most boring man on the planet, his or ours. The rest of the cast are all really boring stereotypes, the jock, the nerd, the kind one. All brought together in a really forced way. This is Patrick Ness's first TV project and it shows with characters dancing around flashing neon exposition and jokes so clunky you can literally hear the thud as they fail to land. Characters are vain and have ridiculous leaps in logic such as April, a girl with so few defining character traits I actually forgot she was on the team, April is attacked by a "Shadow-kin" and, after being rescued we get the back story of our "hero" and her response "We're going to have to cancel prom", now in Buffy that would be the joke the scene ended on but no we continue on making the character just look insane and insensitive to the fact the person who saved her life just told her about how his planet died. No one would act like this, and that's my main problem, these characters are really fake, they're not what actually teenagers are like, they are what a group of writers and executives think teenagers are like, what they think will appeal to them. I should know, I'm in my second year at sixth form, I'm the target audience for this and all I'm seeing is a group of target psychographics flailing across a screen for 50 minutes. And don't even get me started on deus ex machina, the Doctor, the title character of the series the show spun off from is reduced to nothing but a get out of jail free card appearing to fix the problem and then leaving twice! This leaves the writer with the problem that they now have to write around why they can't just call the Doctor every time now. But I believe this series doesn't respect its roots in using the Doctor as nothing more than a tool, but that's just me.
That being said this show does a have some redeeming qualities, Ms Quill for one is the break out character of the show, she's by far the most memorable and interesting but even she is restricted by poor dialogue. The story is basic, a twist on the riches to rags story so it can't really go to wrong. The VFX both practical and digital are spectacular rivalling even Doctor Who for some of the best I've seen on British TV in a long while so its got that in its corner. All in all I believe this series is bad, but not irredeemable, its the kind of thing I would check back with next season as the rest of the season is written by Patrick Ness so little chance of the series changing direction at this point. Give the series a try if you're in the UK as its free on Iplayer and make up your own mind.