Doctor Who Review : Series 9 Episode 4 - "Before the Flood".
On a remote army outpost, a fearsome alien warlord called the Fisher King sets in motion a twisted plan to ensure his own survival.
SPOILER ALERT: You know what's coming, spoilers about the episode will be revealed in this review. So I suggest to those who don't like spoilers, if you don't wish the episode to be spoiled for you, read this review a bit later.
So "Before the Flood" is set before the events that we saw happen last week in "Under the Lake" and the episode starts off with a pre title sequence of just The Doctor on his own in the TARDIS, talking us through a little story about Beethoven and who composed Beethoven's fifth, really interesting and intriguing almost something I could see the seventh doctor talking us through as the seventh doctor liked to give monologues like that.
That part of the episode was good for me until The Doctor got his guitar out and started playing it. Its not that I object the doctor mixing in with modern culture I'm all for it, obviously because I like Eccleston's costume and I like the Capaldi's hoodie variants to his costume. I just don't think the guitar needs to be an additional feature to add to the doctor's street cred.
We've got that in terms of his clothes and his attitudes and so I feel the guitar is over doing it a little, what makes matters worse for me is that it mixes into a rock style theme of the opening title sequence, grrr. I hated it, it didn't do anything for me it just came back to the fact that it was just being 'too modern' too in your face to terms of adapting to today's culture.
Putting that aside once you start to unravel the mystery behind what happened, the story from within this part of the episode starts to get very interesting. The trouble is with the bits in between with The Doctor and the other two people who's names I forget, is that it's very stalled. The pacing is like driving a car but then stalling. The moments in when you get that stalling effect is when you find out a little bit about what happened and then The Doctor says 'We need to get back to the TARDIS' it goes back and forth with that for a while which I felt was a little distracting.
The bits in-between with Clara and the other two on the water base in the future were great. Especially the bit with the deaf woman walking through the corridors and the sound was as she could hear it. I thought that was a nice touch. It's in those parts the story starts to get more edgy and pacy and then you have to cut back to what The Doctor's doing in the past and things get a lot slower, so the pace of this episode is nothing like last week, its very up and down.
The main attraction of this whole story is 'The Fisher King' he is up there with some of the greatest designed monsters ever created on the show, he's up there with 'The Destroyer' and 'The Racnoss Empress" for example. Sadly we didn't see enough of him, and it takes a while for him to appear properly, but once you do see him the make up and design of him is fantastic, real bone like features and flesh parts are authentic, he looks intimidating due to the hight of him he is massive. He looks scary and overall very good indeed just a shame we didn't see enough of him.
The Ghosts were the stars of this story for me, they were more scary then The Fisher King. There were a few jumpy moments with the ghosts in this which kind of put you on edge and more alert, which is good as it goes back to that inside fear that we can all relate to in a cultural anxiety.
We got Prentis played by Paul Kaye, who was a rather eccentric character at the heart of him. A weird rat like humanoid creature in a victorian suit. I liked his interaction with The Doctor and I know that Peter Capaldi enjoyed playing off Prentis in the scenes with him, its the just The doctor's interest in other aliens. I didn't mind Prentis so much, obviously he's more scary as a ghost. He wasn't around much in the story for the audience to give off a feel of whether they liked him or not. He was just there and then he was dead.
The Doctor ghost thing was poor. I have to say for the sake of me and my anticipation of wanting to be really impressed by this, I did feel cheated by how that was achieved in terms of story. The Doctor Ghost is a hologram, The Doctor didn't die and become a ghost. I'm not sure how The Doctor could become a ghost anyway, he's a timelord he can just regenerate can't he? I just didn't get why they made such a fuss over The Doctor has to die and then fob us off with an explanation such us 'oh don't worry it was all just a hologram' seems a bit lazy when you come to think about it. I would have preferred if its something more polished and well thought out.
I didn't really get what happened in the end, the dam burst and the town got flooded, and the fisher king got washed away, then what happened? the ending was confusing. I just didn't see how things got so rounded off, even with a two parter there is a problem of rushed endings and not full gone explained conclusions.
The overall rounded conclusion was predictable as well, I could tell from the hints the doctor left off in the monologue at the beginning that he wrote Beethoven's fifth. Not that I was thinking about it but I could tell, like any of the audience actually cared about that anyway, they're not thinking about who wrote Beethoven's fifth, they want to find out what's happening with the fisher king or why is the doctor a ghost? No, just poor ending. And they need to get rid of the sonic glasses.
It wasn't as good as last week, but I do like the idea behind this story a lot and it's probably Toby Whitehouse's best story he's done so far to give him credit. It was a very imaginative and clever idea, just let down by three or four major duds. 3/5.
Giving this story a total of : 6/10!
NEXT WEEK: The girl who died. - The one with Maisie Williams.
