"It Takes You Away" by Ed Hime, directed by Jamie Childs. Spoilers after the cut.
As the Doctor and the several other people she carts around with her arrived at a fjord in present-day Norway I initially got distracted by the usual stuff that distracts me in Doctor Who - like how, of her predecessors, Jodie Whittaker's Doctor most resembles (early, pre-Messiah complex) David Tennant's, what with the big coat and the soil-munching being a bit like him licking everything. Also, how does the TARDIS' psychic translation effect work with someone who speaks English, but not as their first language? Because they'll meet an alien from seven thousand years ago who sounds like he's from Bristol, but the Norwegians sound Norwegian. So is the TARDIS translating the companions' speech into Norwegian and then the Norwegians' back into English but with a Norwegian accent, or do the Norwegians speak good enough English that it's not bothering to translate?
Anyway at some point it became apparent that this episode was on crack so I wasn't that bothered about any of that any more. Except for the Doctor's tying of string as a way to find her way back through a maze. It's terrible. That string was barely hanging on to the rock, it probably would have fallen off anyway without The Actor Kevin Eldon having to do anything.
This was probably the episode I most enjoyed this season since the premiere, mainly because it was Just. So. Weird. This also meant that, in a series that's had a lot of good episodes which have largely hit the same beats as each other, for once it stood out, and one thing Chibbers doesn't seem to have been able to do (apart from write good) is embrace the fact that Doctor Who can be something completely different from one week to the next.
"It Takes You Away" has the flavour of a lot of the original series - particularly "The Mind Robber," would it have been entirely surprising if one of the companions had been recast mid-episode? Probably not. Also a lot of Third and Fourth Doctor stories what with the wandering around caves, and the special effects that look like the FX budget might have been getting a bit thin and they needed to hold something back for the finale. Third Doctor references made explicit of course in the reference to reversing the polarity. Also some non-Who echoes - the balloon-like red light is a bit IT and the mirror world is a bit Coraline (and actually reversing all the shots from the mirror world is a nicely disorientating touch, because even the most symmetrical faces aren't completely identical in a mirror, so everyone looks that little bit different from how we're used to seeing them.)
Hey, they resolved the pointless "Grandad" thing a week earlier than I expected and with a lot less fuss. On the one hand I like that Tosin Cole played it about as seriously as it deserved (basically throwing it out there in a sort of "well this matters to you for some reason so you can have it YOU WEIRDO" way.) On the other hand it didn't result in Bradley Walsh getting Adriced so it's swings and roundabouts.
No but really though, this week's threat was a sentient universe that was also a CGI frog with the voice of Sharon D. Clarke.
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