What happens when you take the training wheels off your bike? You either fall over and land on your head or you ride straight and true.
That was the question on Doctor Who this week. Though it feels like a question that has been asked time and time again, the question was asked again of Clara. Unlike every other time that Clara might have been left to ride on her own, this was the first time that she pushed back.
One thing that tends to happen when you tag along with The Doctor on the TARDIS is that you leave your real-life behind for a few months or years. That’s not the case if you’re Clara Oswald. Though she’s done many, many things while a travelling companion on the TARDIS, the one thing she hasn’t done is pack her things and move in.
This week, we finally gotten some semblance of payoff to Clara’s dueling lives as The Doctor becomes The Caretaker (who likes to be called The Doctor) at Clara’s school. Now she has to juggle maintaining her sanity while her personal life and time traveler life collide.
When there’s a game that I’m interested in reviewing, I reach out to the public relations officers at the publisher of the game (or their contracted PR firm) to see if I can get a copy for review. More often than not, I don’t get a copy of the game. Usually, I can wait for a sale and pick up a copy to play it through but usually that’s not for several months that it gets down to a price within my budget.
In the case of Murdered: Soul Suspect, I was figuring that Steam’s Holiday or a spring sale would bring it down to a price where I would buy it. Then I got it for $15 from the Humble Store in early August. Two months after the game was released, I’m already getting it for some 70% off. While I know it was a big enough flop to force developer Airtight Games out of business, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?
If there’s anyway to describe the first few episodes of Peter Capaldi’s run at the helm of the TARDIS, it might be that he’s getting a lot of the standard Doctor Who adventures out of the way. There’s the Dalek adventure. He’s done the adventure with a historical figure. There’s the horror episode. This week, it was timey-wimey genre bending.
The Doctor and Clara were tasked with robbing the most secure bank in the universe. However, this wasn’t the standard bank robbery caper. Of course not. This is Doctor Who.
Telltale Games had a bit of an up-and-down reputation prior to the release of The Walking Dead. That game completely changed the way that most thought of Telltale and many critics felt that they set the bar for storytelling in games. After the numerous game of the year awards for TWD and a critically acclaimed launch for The Wolf Among Us, Telltale’s second comic book adaptation, The Walking Dead: Season Two was one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2014.
The problem with a game with all that hype is that it occasionally bogs down under the weight. The problem with a sequel is that they struggle to balance the needs of new gamers to the franchise with the desires of people continuing the story. There were times when TWD:S2 caved to these pressures as Telltale tried very hard to copy what made Season One so loved but missing the emotional mark that Season One hit. However, once Season Two came into its own, Telltale had put out another stellar experience.
Steven Moffat has two tricks that he really likes to use when writing episodes. The first is creating and/or solving problems through wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey time paradoxes. I’ve lost count of the number of times that we’ve seen that. The second is trying to scare little children of everyday things. We’ve done statues, shadows and this week, we’re supposed to be scared of being alone in the dark.
Moffat decided to hybrid timey-wimey with everyday horror in Listen. In many ways, it’s a spiritual successor to Blink, the first time we met the Weeping Angels. Maybe it was a bit too familiar, though.
Coming into the second season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, one of the big things people were talking about is how the game would be able to continue with Clementine as the protagonist. After all, she’s just a little girl. She couldn’t fill the shoes of Lee.
Well, literally, Clem couldn’t fill his shoes. Figuratively, once we got all the character introductions out of the way and got into character and plot development, this season took The Walking Dead to heights surpassing Season One. Sure, the episodes are shorter and maybe the illusion of choice isn’t quite as strong as the first season but amazing story and character writing made this game one of the highlights of 2014.
Now we reach the end of Season Two and boy, does Telltale give this season a spectacular send off.
What happens when legends meet? I don’t mean two famous people but more what happens when two mythical creatures meet. Sure, we’ve had enough cross-over movies, TV shows and comics that cross-overs have worn out their welcome but there’s still the special moment every now and then.
But what happens when two mythical creatures who aren’t all that mythical get in a battle of egos? That’s the question that is being asked and answered by this weekend’s episode of Doctor Who. The Doctor, a myth throughout space and time, comes face to face with Robin Hood, a myth of Earth. They’re very real and very spectacular.
Since Steven Moffat has taken over as executive producer of Doctor Who, the Daleks have been used sparingly. There have only really been two Dalek episodes, 2010’s Victory of the Daleks and 2012’s Asylum of the Daleks (which was more a Clara episode than a Dalek episode). This is in stark contrast to the Russell T. Davies era (which I have more than this issue with) which had eight Dalek episodes in four seasons and generally made them look like chumps in all but one of those stories.
For the second episode of the Capaldi era, we’ve already got ourselves a Dalek episode. There’s no better way to throw a Doctor head first into the chaos of the universe than pitting him against his arch-nemesis.
While I was writing the review for this week’s episode of Doctor Who, I realized that I was behind in posting my Doctor Who reviews over on The Lowdown. I promised Doctor Who reviews over here this season so you’re getting all three episode reviews this week. Today is the season premiere, Deep Breath. On Thursday is the Into The Dalek review. Usual Friday service begins with the third episode review for Robot of Sherwood.
Given the recent explosion in popularity that Doctor Who has seen on this side of the pond, it seems as though that Deep Breath might be the greatest test of the revived Doctor Who. Sure, this is the fourth incarnation of the series but it with Doctor Who becoming more and more popular during Matt Smith’s tenure at the controls of the TARDIS, this will be many fans’ first regeneration.
While Deep Breath won’t go down as the greatest Doctor Who adventure ever, it certainly worked well at showing that the show is changing pace and themes with the new man in the blue box.
The Lowdown 