The Zygon Invasion

The Zygon Invasion was poorly paced, had an uninspiring guest cast, and failed in its attempt to be a gritty thriller. It featured allusions to asylum seekers and terrorism which seem out of place in Doctor Who. It's a show with a broad scope and I think it probably could, at a push, tackle these themes, but it didn't manage it here. At least not well. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers premise was overly familiar and nothing new was done with it. The sets were surprisingly lifeless. No, not even the needless portrait of William Hartnell in the UNIT safe house could help.

I didn't like this episode. I wanted to, because I think this series has been an improvement of Capaldi's first. I want him to have a good tenure with the role. I wanted to see his reunion with Rebecca Front play out in a knowing, entertaining fashion. I wanted to enjoy the Zygons. For the first ten or fifteen minutes I thought I was going to like it. Everything seemed to be moving in the right direction with the Mysterious Kidnap™ of Osgood, the subplot of Cara helping a kid whose parents were clearly Zygons, the Doctor doing some detective work (something Capaldi should get to do more of, perhaps instead of being written as a man having a mid-life crisis with a guitar), and things happening in places that weren't Britain.

But then it all became dull and tedious and any sense of humour that had been present evaporated. The most positive things I can say are that Peter Capaldi was good (and deserves better), the location used for Turmezistan was very nice (particularly the church doors), and Evil Clara is my Favourite Clara. That's really all I have to say on the episode.

But I'm not going to end there. Because this episode was broadcast on October 31st. That's Halloween, just to be clear. That a show that prominently features aliens and monsters and strange goings on on a weekly basis did not make use of an episode falling on Halloween seems strange. Especially when you consider than after fifty-two years of existence we've yet to get a Doctor Who take on the holiday. And we get an annual Christmas-themed episode, something which is far harder to wrap Doctor Who around.

It doesn't matter that this season is all about two parters. The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived showed better than perhaps any other two part story that episodes can be linked yet have entirely different settings. We could have had a Halloween themed episode followed by something more normal next week. Or, y'know, they could have simply kept the spookiness floating about for a week. It would 't have hurt. It's not as if three years of scarier than average stories did Tom Baker any harm.

That's my biggest complaint about this episode really: that it exists instead of something that would have made far more sense.