*WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS*
Returning to 2018, the Doctor and her companions discover a seemingly abandoned, heavily barricaded cabin in the woods in Norway and investigate. Inside, they meet Hanne – a young blind girl whose father has disappeared. Hanne warns them all of a mysterious creature in the surrounding forest that appears at night, while Graham and Ryan notice a mirror in the cabin that doesn’t show their reflections.
The Doctor is uncertain if the monster and the mirror – which acts as a portal to another plane of existence – are connected. Leaving Ryan to protect Hanne, the Doctor begins a quest with Graham and Yaz to learn where the portal leads. Encountering an unscrupulous creature called Ribbons of the Seven Stomachs and attacked by flesh-eating giant moths, they escape to the portal’s true destination: a world that is seemingly a mirror of our own, but where Hanne’s mother and Graham’s wife are both alive. But how can this world exist, and can the Doctor and her companions ever leave it?
The most wonderful thing about science fiction is that it can be full of big, brilliant and new ideas. While sometimes it uses futuristic (or alternative) settings and concepts as allegories that relate to the past or present, it can also be a genre of pure creativity. Over the years, Doctor Who has used that creative freedom and delivered some fascinating ideas.
While this season generally hasn’t delivered much in that department, this episode does – in the form of the Solitract, a sentient being that is its own universe. It may not be an entirely original concept and it’s not that different from Mogo the Living Planet at times. Yet it’s a big idea that’s definitely worthy of a whole lot of screen time in a Doctor Who story. It’s just the sort of thing that the Doctor (and the audience) would get a kick out of learning more about.
Except the concept doesn’t get that screen time, and the Doctor and the audience are denied the opportunity to learn anything at all. Even though it delivers a fascinating idea in the last few minutes, the rest of this episode is pointless filler which tries to be Evil Dead, Shyamalan’s The Village, Stephen King’s IT, and a watered-down Neil Gaiman story all in one. Even when the potential reward to viewers for enduring this concoction is revealed, it’s squandered by presenting this sentient universe in the form of… a talking frog on a chair. Because… just because.
Really.
Still, the idea itself is a good one even if the Doctor once again deduces the truth through guesswork and luck instead of intelligence. The resolution to the story is certainly far better than the first forty minutes of the episode, which features some of the laziest writing seen in the series so far.
The audience is asked to accept the improbable scenario of a father selfishly travelling to an alternate universe he just happened to stumble upon, purposefully traumatising his blind daughter by trapping her in an isolated cabin where she hides in a cupboard, living in fear of a monster that doesn’t exist and that he built up in her mind. That’s psychological torture, so why should we sympathise with this horrible man? Yes, it may be the stuff of fairytales but even by those standards it simply doesn’t make sense.
Later, Hanne threatens to call the police on Ryan, but why didn’t she phone them to report her missing father or the monster that’s terrorizing her? Then there’s the anti-zone portion of the episode, which was nothing more than padding in a further attempt to turn the episode into some kind of dark fairytale. It fails and instead comes across exactly like what it is: a cartoonish villain with a deliberately silly name holding a red balloon trying to waste everyone’s time.
There’s some light at the end of the tunnel when Graham reunites with a representation of his deceased wife but, for all the good intentions (and performances) of the scene, viewers will know it’s all hokum. The only person dumb enough to buy into any of it would be Hanne’s psychopathic father… who is happily reunited with his daughter, instead of being chastised and locked away. Then again, the Doctor gave a free pass to the Kerblam! system a few episodes ago too, even though it killed an innocent employee just to make a point.
Ultimately, that leaves us with the frog on the chair who’s a sentient universe and just wants someone to play with. And regardless of the drudging, aimless adventure that led to that point, it’s still a cool idea. It’s a shame the episode didn’t start off with it and build from there, because it could have been great. Instead, it’s another disappointing Doctor Who episode that raises too many questions and offers no answers and little entertainment. It doesn’t take you away, but it would have been nice if it did.
The Review
Doctor Who: It Takes You Away
A great ending let down by… well, everything else.
Review Breakdown
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Verdict
I stopped watching at episode five of this series. There was no fun in watching the episodes so why bother? I had the misfortune to be visiting relatives who were watching Doctor Who on Sunday and I am so glad I haven’t been wasting my time waiting for it to improve.
Frankly it’s all but unwatchable. It feels like everything good from the series has been removed and everything that is wrong amplified. The terrible plot, dreadful music, poor direction, scripts that aren’t worth the paper and some acting that wouldn’t go amiss in a butchers shop. Ham left right and centre.
If you’d shown the talking frog even to folks who watched Who in the seventies they’d have thought it was rubbish. I just checked the ratings and the figures have dropped over three and a half million viewers on the night from episode one. 8.74 million to 5.07 million. That’s on a Sunday night when the competition is light. No wonder the BBC shied away from a Saturday slot.
The reason is simple. People have been watching the series, who’d previously watched it before, and had been waiting for it to improve. They finally appreciate it’s not going to and are simply not tuning in. The BBC are killing a series that had survived even the poor writing of Peter Capaldi’s last season, (with the exception of his final episode) and the first two seasons of Matt Smith.
The difference is this time that the changes are so huge that I don’t see how it can be brought back.Again, three and a half million viewers lost in nine episodes. That’s incredible. With last weeks episode to go by, prepare for the on the night figures to fall to just above four million for the final episode. It literally was that bad.
I’d finish on this point. Does anyone think that the new viewers watching Doctor Who will be as dedicated to the show as viewers lost have been? I’d suggest that if Countryfile, essentially a glorified adult Blue Peter clone, can get ratings higher than Doctor Who in the same time slot, there is an inbuilt audience who will watch anything.
A talking frog on a dining chair was the preferred medium of communication chosen by a sentient universe. It has a central role in the cosmology of our universe, but this is the first time anyone’s thought to mention this in fifty years of the show. That’s okay though, because there was room for another readers digest homily about feelings and truth and whatever cheesy Sunday school moralising fitted the plot this week. Actors again making the best of a bad script. Does the BBC have a Doctor Who death wish ?
I was one of the many disappointed that the new Doctor was to be a woman, though not for misogynist reasons. Still, I was prepared to reserve judgement. I have to say that this show is no longer Doctor Who. The episodes are no longer the exciting adventures they used to be. The science fiction elements are minimal. In fact, every story so far could have been told without them. In Demons of the Punjabs the aliens were completely irrelevant. And none of the alien so-called threats have been very threatening at all. There have been floating rags, flesh-eating moths, muddy tentacles and that weird oddly cute monster that was eating the spaceship.The moralising is annoying. The Doctor’s outright preachy judgementalism is unattractive. The writers seem to pretend that Doctor Who didn’t exist before Jodie. Dont get me wrong. Whittaker is a fine actor. She just isnt Doctor Who. And that’s because the writing is horrible. And a lonely universe in the form of a frog? Seriously??
basically I find the episodes to be at best as interesting as the worst Tennant & Smith filler, but on par with the drivel that was Peter Capaldi’s last season with ‘Bill’, who I found worse than the current lot, or actually on a par with Ryan. The Doctor is giving free passes to evil and evil doers (like the abusive dad here) and not investigating the half-baked villain introduced in her first and second stories (which I thought may be an overriding arc but no!) She is, compared to all three (or four) previous Doctors, about as menacing as the frog she converses with here. Bad writing, wooden 2D acting (Whitaker included) & no structure of anything past a pc history lesson in all but maybe 2 episodes make thjis season the WORST SEASON YET. I pray that a new showrunner will save this mess.
This season of Doctor Who is the worst I have ever watched and I have watched every episode since William hartnell. It is not that Jodie Whittaker is doing a bad job as a female doctor, it’s just that the scripts are very bad. There are so many other problems with this season. Why has the doctor got three assistants? Two too many and the acting by them is poor as well with wooden deliveries and bad lines. It is very sad to see a British. Sci fi Franchise that has been so successful in the past, now being reduced to this. What makes DW is its quirky Britishness, Daleks, cyber men, the tardis etc. Slow simple storylines with British quirkiness and not fast paced manic drivel. It is a very sad day.