Sunday, June 01, 2008

Doctor Who: Silence in the Library

It is always slightly awkward admitting to being a Doctor Who fan. Even now, with the TV series one of the most watched programmes on the television, people still look at you oddly if you say you are a fan. You can almost hear them tutting slightly, and realise that they are rolling their eyes mentally, even if they don't actually do so. You can hear the great unasked question swimming around in their minds - "why on earth are you a fan of that?"

The answer is simple - episodes like last night's Silence in the Library. I'm not going to go through every reason why it was a great piece of TV - if you go to the BBC Doctor Who website you can watch it for free there (for the next week or so) and see for yourself. But so much of it comes down to the concepts. And last night was a great example of where the show takes a very simple, every day concept - in this case shadows - and turns it into something nightmarish. If you haven't watch it - because you were tuned into some godawful talent show - go watch it now.

And the best thing about it? It was written by Steven Moffat, who is taking over as chief writer for the show. The best episode of this series thus far was written by the person who will be writing the bulk of the scripts come 2010. Expect the show to get much better then.

And much scarier...

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3 Comments:

At 6:47 am , Blogger asquith said...

I'm not a fan of that programme because I refuse to watch any TV at all (except University Challenge). That's a good enough reason, I reckon.

 
At 1:11 am , Blogger JohnM said...

Well I grant you that Moffat is far and away the best writer on the series but he does have an annoying tendency to slip in political one liners.

eg. The Empty Child has Doctor Who telling the blitzed Londoners to remember to create the Welfare State. Apart from the fact the Liberal Party might like to claim the credit in 1911 over the post war Labour party, such a comment frankly jars.

 
At 9:42 pm , Blogger The Nameless Libertarian said...

Yes, the politics of Moffat - and pretty much every other writer for the new series - seems to be the sort of left of centre crap that you would have thought would have gone out of fashion with the fall of Blair. But this is nothing new for Doctor Who - previous writers have been members of the Communist Party, and previous script editors have wanted to bring down the (then Thatcherite) government.

I look to Doctor Who for entertainment. I certainly don't look to it for relevant and agreeable political opinions.

Not least because the Doctor himself is arguably a neo-con...

 

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