#love is one chasing the other down to have some tragic quote exchange before murderizing them right? right

[milianthus]

fantober 2024, day 7: chibi style

alright well it's inevitable that i had to draw my wife claude von riegan (no one bother him he's having fun holding aggro)

[the-desolated-quill]

Cold Blood - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Did I mention how much I don’t like Chris Chibnall as a writer and how I really, really didn’t want him to write a Silurian story? I’m sure I did.

‘But Quill,’ I can hear you saying in my head, ‘it’s not that bad. The only reason you’re being so negative about it is because you’re comparing it to the original. Why not judge it on its own merits?’ Well first of all, it’s impossible not to compare this to the original because Chibnall is trying so desperately to emulate it (and failing miserably), and second, even by its own merits, it’s still shit.

The reason why the original Silurian/human debate worked so well was because there was no clear right or wrong answer. Both sides had a point and neither side was presented as being 100% good or evil. It was complex, nuanced and thus interesting. The debate in Cold Blood however is so cack handed and so extreme that it’s impossible to be invested in this at all.

Let’s start with the Silurian side of the debate. You have Restac, a character who’s even more boring and one note than her twin sister Alaya (i didn’t even think that was possible). Her solution to every problem is to kill all the humans. A mysterious drill from the surface is detected. Kill the humans. The perimeter has been breached. Kill the humans. You lose your car keys. Kill the humans. She never considers the possibility that this is all one giant misunderstanding. Nor is there ever an explanation for why she hates humans so much. She’s just a dull cardboard cutout foaming at the mouth.

Then there’s Eldane, played by Stephen Moore. The leader of the Silurians and who is so insanely nice to the point where it almost starts to become comical. Even when Rory, Ambrose and Tony show up carrying Alaya’s corpse, and Ambrose threatens to kill all the Silurians with the drill, Eldane still tries to help the Doctor and everyone escape at the end even by going so far as to gas his own people. What the fuck?! You could probably sit there quoting excerpts from Mein Kampf whilst jetting heroin into your eyes and defacing a library book in front of him and he’d still insist that peace could be brokered between our species.

Finally there’s the Silurian scientist Malohkeh, played by Richard Hope, who is by far the most confusing character. In this episode they go out of their way to present him as this cuddly, reasonable person who abhors violence and confrontation, but in the previous episode he was the one torturing Mo and Amy and threatening to dissect them. Talk about inconsistent.

The humans are just as bad. Tony, Ambrose’s dad played by Robert Pugh, was poisoned in the previous episode and is slowly dying, so he secretly offers to let Alaya go in exchange for a cure. Now this could be interesting. Deceit, backstabbing, survival at all costs etc. Except it’s never brought up again and even at the end he’s still treated as one of the good guys. What?! It gets even weirder when he chastises Ambrose for killing Alaya as though he’s the moral authority when a few scenes earlier he was prepared to sell out his own grandson in exchange for his own miserable life, the conniving bastard.

Ambrose too, played by Nia Roberts, is just plain daft. She’s desperate to save her son and dad (and husband Mo, although she keeps forgetting to mention him. Bad writing or a sign of marital problems? I’ll let you decide... but the answer is bad writing), and threatens to torture Alaya for information. Three problems with this. One, it’s already been established that Alaya isn’t going to talk, so torture is pointless. Two, she already knows the Doctor has gone underground to negotiate an exchange of hostages, so if she just sits patiently and doesn’t interfere, everything will be fine. And three, there’s no buildup to this whatsoever. She’s not suitably desperate enough to resort to such drastic action. All that’s happened is that Alaya has taunted her a bit and now all of a sudden she’s a cold blooded murderer. This isn’t subtle character shading. This is just picking random scenarios out of a hat.

And then there’s the Doctor, who is quite possibly the biggest idiot of the bunch. He insists that a peace can be brokered and that despite all their atrocities and crimes and violent actions, humans are still nice, kind, lovely people that the Silurians can totes be bezzy mates with. Where the Doctor is getting this idea from I don’t know considering this is the fourth time he’s tried to get the humans and the Silurians to play nice and it never works out. But my biggest problem is that he makes it all sound so simple. He claims there’s no reason why the Silurians and the humans couldn’t work together, but as I’ve already mentioned at the beginning of this review, it’s not as simple as that. We have trouble sharing the planet with members of our own species. How are we going to cope with another? And Nasreen sensibly points out that we can barely sustain our population due to limited resources. We can’t just shove another population of people on top. But no. The Doctor says it’s possible, therefore it must be so. I’m sick of New Who constantly squashing any chance for a complex moral debate in favour of overly simplistic answers. I would much rather watch Nasreen and Eldane debate about their futures rather than watch boring chase scenes and the Doctor pissing about like a tit in a trance.

Also how are Amy and Nasreen qualified to negotiate on behalf of the human race? I know Moffat and Chibnall are trying to sell the idea of the everyman hero, but again, it’s not as simple as that. How are they going to explain this to the people on the surface? Are the Silurians just going to march into the UN and go ‘Hi guys! Sorry to disturb you. We’re the Silurians. Basically these two humans that you don’t know and have no authority whatsoever have said we can share the planet with you guys. Hope that’s okay. Bye.’

Also Amy makes the idiotic suggestion that the Silurians can populate the Sahara, the Nevada Plains and the Australian Outback because they’re ‘uninhabited.’

Blimey, I’d hate to be the one that has to tell the Tuareg or the indigenous Australians that they’re going to have to share their lands with a bunch of lizard people.

Anyway the negotiations break down, everyone scarpers, the Doctor tells Tony that he’s not in fact dying but actually mutating (Huh?), and so has to stay underground to be decontaminated while Nasreen elects to stay with him (it’s a shame. I’d love to have seen her as a companion. She got on so well with the Doctor and Meera Syal is always fun to watch). Then Eldane poisons his own people (da fuck?!), the Doctor blows up the drill and then makes the insanely stupid suggestion that Mo, Ambrose and Elliot spread the word that in a thousand years time the planet is to be shared.

That is quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There are two possible scenarios to this. Either everyone dismisses them as a bunch of weirdos or UNIT and Torchwood get wind of it and venture underground for a bit of pest extermination. (Also doesn’t the Earth get scorched by solar flares a thousand years in the future in The Beast Below?)

And then just when you think things couldn’t possibly get any worse, that bloody crack shows up again. It has the same effect as the one in Flesh And Stone did, effectively trampling all over the narrative. But then things take an unexpected turn when Rory kicks the bucket. Both Matt Smith and Karen Gillan are to be commended here because they both act their socks off in this scene, but it’s hard to be emotionally invested because Rory’s not dead. And I’m not just saying that with the benefit of hindsight. Even at the time I didn’t think Rory was actually dead because we saw him and Amy’s future selves waving at the beginning of The Hungry Earth. So I suspected that Moffat’s hand was hovering over the reset button. It was just a question of when he was going to press it. So yeah, it did dampen the emotional impact ever so slightly.

Now usually I like to inject some humour into my reviews, usually in the form of cynicism, bad puns, and occasionally through the use of smutty innuendo because I’m really, really childish. Believe it or not, I don’t sit there thinking of naughty things to say. Sometimes the best ones are just handed to me on a silver platter, and this is one such occasion. I see it as my reward for putting up with an hour and a half of crap, so if you don’t mind I’d like to take this opportunity to just savour the moment.

Ready? Here we go.

The Doctor sticks his hand up Moffat’s crack and pulls out a shard of the TARDIS.

Oh thank you God! You’re too kind to me!

Cold Blood is terrible in every way. Chris Chibnall tries so hard to replicate the success of the original Doctor Who And The Silurians, but forgets what made the original so good to begin with. If you’re interested in the Silurians and/or want to get into the classic series, I urge you to watch the original Silurian story. It’s dark and morally complex with well written, nuanced characters and the ending has a shocking and tragic impact because you actually grow to care for both sides. If you’re prepared to look past the bad 70s special effects and cheap looking rubber latex monster designs, it’s a treat. The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood on the other hand is an absolute failure that pales in comparison to the original. The characters are one dimensional, the moral debate is reduced to two sets of extremes with none of the complexity or nuance the story requires, and I didn’t give a single shit about anyone or anything. The Silurians deserve so much better than this.