Doctor Who: The Ghost Monument (2018) - Review
Wait for it...wait for it...BAM! New title sequence, baby! Oh, and what a title sequence it is. That new time vortex looks incredible, and the effects work looks so much sharper than Peter Capaldi's. While it is much more minimalist by the standards of 21st Century Who, I do appreciate that element - even if I am curious to see whether or not the TARDIS will show up in next week's titles.
Speaking of the TARDIS...I have opinions. Firstly, the exterior Police Box looks lovely. Really nice new paint scheme, cool to see the darker door sign return, and the blue lamp is much more striking somehow. The shape looks a little strange to me, and I can't help but wonder if it should be slightly thinner, but given our larger TARDIS crew, I suspect that that encouraged the production designer to make a larger box to fit them all in. Once we step inside the new TARDIS though, I feel like the design doesn't really hold up. There's lots of interesting ideas and motifs, but this new set feels like a step in perhaps the wrong direction. It's very striking and different to the last model, but it looks less like the TARDIS as much as it does any other alien ship. The crystal motif is lovely, but the new time rotor and struts look waaaaaaaay too big. The console itself looks messy and awkward, despite some cool little additions. Gone are the roundels, instead replaced with varying hexagonal patterns that look a bit messy. It also feels much smaller than the previous set, and the lack of levels doesn't really help this aspect. I also think that the colour grading in the reveal scene was a little off, and the low--level lighting didn't really help at all.
'The Ghost Monument' itself though was a very interesting episode, blending traditional sci-fi, whimsical fantasy and character drama, but ultimately culminating in...nothing especially remarkable, if I'm honest. Yaz felt a little pushed the side, while Graham got the most to work with here. Ryan gets a strange comedic moment shooting down the robots, but it feels awkward and out-of-place. Chibnall's script has to force the Doctor and her companions into the story, making the opening feel a little clunky in retrospect. I also found it strange that, despite being the titular Ghost Monument, the TARDIS wasn't actually important to the race. In fact, it doesn't even show up in either the base the characters visit or the mysterious tent - it shows up on a random grassy hill, which made that reveal moment feel quite detached from the episode. I'm also not sure if the episode even had a narrative climax, but there we go.
Strangely though, 'The Ghost Monument' seems to be enforcing some kind of story arc for this series, something previously denied by Chibnall and co. Who is the "timeless child"? And, given that we're now starting to see the Stenza's impact on the rest of the Universe, could they be our "big bad" for Series 11? If so, colour me disappointed. I found the Stenza to be particularly uninteresting in the first episode, so the idea of expanding on a pretty generic alien race in future installments doesn't excite me, even if it does somewhat intrigue me. Perhaps Chibnall has something up his sleeve, and the ultimate return of the Stenza won't be as dull as I think it will be. I guess I'm just comparing it to Class' Shadow Kin, although they were considerably worse monsters to recur throughout the series.
All that said though, 'The Ghost Monument' looked absolutely gorgeous. The stunning production values have been carried-over from 'The Woman Who Fell To Earth' to make this pretty by-the-numbers episode look and feel so much more exciting, new and bold. The location work and sets really added to this effect, and it really felt like we were on an uncharted planet as opposed to just some quarry in Wales (not that I have anything against the show returning to Welsh quarries). It was ultimately the clunky script that let the episode down though, resulting in a "pretty good, not great" episode. Maybe it needs a re-watch.
Comments
Post a Comment