Two weeks in a row Doctor Who has managed to deliver a near classic episode. This wasn’t just good, it was “remember what this show is capable of” good. Scary monsters done with great SFX, and a possibly moral dilemma that impacts the whole season.
We are introduced to the “Boneless”.
They are creatures from a 2 dimensional plane. They are bleeding in to our world, and basically flattening people and things in order to interact with them. In this case that means stealing the bodies of the people the have killed. There are some amazing effects, such as the “2d-ing” of objects and they Boneless taking on flawed 3d reproductions of their victims.
The “wrongness” of how they looked and moved just added to the overall creep factor. It was hands down one of the neatest effects I have ever seen on the show.
This story also involved them leeching energy from the TARDIS to interact with our 3 dimensions, causing it to shrink on the outside eventually trapping the Doctor inside.
Clara is left outside to “play The Doctor”, and she does a great job. So well in fact that it seems the are setting up a big moral question for the end of the season: Clara was mad at the Doctor for being callous, lying, and basically being a huge dick in order to do what had to be done to save people. In this episode, she proves just as adept at all of those things as he is. When she goes looking for kudos for saving the world on her own, he points this out to her in a not so subtle way. One has to wonder if this is chance, or if he is deliberately putting her in these situations to show her what it is like to be him.
Finally this episode had two moments that had my family laughing out loud. Remember when I said the outside of the TARDIS had shrank? Well the inside had not.
And then there was The Doctor needing to move the TARDIS out of harms way when he was all on his own.
Looks silly, but the scenes were played relatively straight, and cause much laughter from the kids especially.
“Flatline” was fantastic, and seems to show the trajectory for the show now that the weirdness of a new Doctor is starting to fade. Here is a promo for next weeks “In The Forest Of The Night”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDRFsj9RkgA&feature=player_detailpage