Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Lizo reviews episode four of Doctor Who

The Daleks are back, hurrah! Last seen making an 'emergency temporal shift' at the end of Series 2, they're now in 1930s New York where they're unsurprisingly up to no good in this first part of a two-part adventure.
There's a lot of great stuff in this story. The special effects team deserves a huge round of applause for some fabulous shots. And the revelation of the Daleks' plan is a genuinely shocking moment. It's a brilliant way of taking the Time Lord's most famous enemies in a totally new direction.
The problem is how we get there.
For a lot of the episode the Daleks aren't very scary at all. Talking more than killing. While The Doctor and Martha spend an awful amount of time chatting and running around with some really not very believable new characters.
If you remember last year's two-part Cybermen story, we didn't really see them until the very end of the first part. But that didn't matter because the gradual build-up happened at the same time as we followed Rose and her heart-breaking quest to see the alternative universe version of her father. Her dad in her own universe died when she was a baby.
Here the build-up isn't nearly as captivating. The Doctor and Martha are investigating people disappearing in the city, and suspect that a mysterious group of Pig Men are involved. At the same time the Daleks are somehow mixed up in the building of the huge Empire State Building.
It's important to remember that although this may not be one of the best Doctor Who adventures, it's still way better than most other stuff on TV at the moment. The series has set itself an almost impossible task because so many episodes are so brilliant. And it's inevitable that occasionally there'll be one like this that's not quite as good.
So the big question now is whether things will really pick up in the second part called Evolution of the Daleks. Well you'll have to wait until next week to find out.
6 out of 10.

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