The Return of Doctor Mysterio Review
Fluff, but in a generally “good Christmas fun” way. Those looking for any sorts of tea leaves regarding Series 10 are essentially out of luck save for the trailer, but those interested in having an entertaining hour of television watching on Christmas were well served, and are surely the more important audience.
Obviously the tagline is “Doctor Who does superheroes,” which is an enticing approach that the series really hadn’t tackled before. And yet there’s something strangely out of sync about it. You’d expect something in which the show riffs on the Marvel movie formula. Instead we get Superman. And (unsurprisingly, really) not the cynical Snyder Superman, but an utterly unreconstructed Superman rooted in old-fashioned sentiments like “the real hero is Clark Kent” that would never pass muster at today’s DC.
In hindsight, strange as this ends up coming off, it’s hardly unexpected. Of course Moffat, who hasn’t exactly done anything that signals him as a big comics guy, was going to go for a straight-up Clark Kent-Lois Lane-Superman love triangle. And all things being equal, he does a pretty good job with it. This isn’t exactly a surprise, given how squarely up his alley it is, and he doesn’t do a particularly surprising or innovative job with it, but again, the goals for a Christmas episode are different, and an entertaining and amusing formula well-executed is what the job calls for. And it’s not as though there aren’t small pleasures. Grant’s status as a nanny and Lucy’s interrogation are enough to give this its own distinct flavor, and are charming touches in their own right. On the whole, it’s sweet – a take on superheroes that’s not particularly fresh, but is still out of pace with the rest of the badly oversignified genre that it’s still refreshing.
The biggest problem is simply lack of space. Everything goes fairly well until the Doctor and Grant’s storylines diverge, and even the dinner scene is good farcy fun, but once the story starts working its way towards resolution it becomes obvious how poorly it fits into its hour-long container. It’s safe to say the plot isn’t really the focus here, and that’s fine, but equally, everything after the Doctor makes it to the spaceship hits that weird note where so much is happening that it feels like nothing is.
It’s also a structure that ends up reducing the Doctor to something of a bystander in his own show. This is firmly an episode about Grant and Lucy. The Doctor gets some fun larking about in the cold open, and there are some decent lines scattered throughout (the Pokemon one, most notably), but this is Doctor Who in its “excuse to do something else” mode, which when the show’s been off the air for a year, is more than slightly frustrating.
Which makes it, in the end, all the more puzzling that the episode opts to end on the note of “the Doctor’s been gone for a long time being with River Song and now he’s very sad.”…
Title says it all really.
The Enterprise is on routine patrol of the Romulan Neutral Zone. Perhaps that should be left to speak for itself.
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