But enjoying the intellectual puzzle does not always cover for shortcomings in character development.
And it's really shortchanged the individual episodes. Of the half-season I saw, I liked "Hide" best: it slingshots the ending, but until then it's a very classic '70's BBC ghost story with a fragile romance that actually convinces me. As long as Caliburn House has existed, it's been haunted by the "Witch of the Well," a whitely screaming apparition with one hand outstretched, always appearing in the same pose—and from the same angle—no matter where in the house it's sighted. The place has become one of those daunting ruins approached only by ghost hunters or debunkers or exorcists, of which the latest pair are Alec Palmer and Emma Grayling: she's the mental medium and he handles the technical end of things and they are visibly, painfully in love with each other, but she's so skinlessly sensitive to emotions (and understandably withdrawn because of it) that she's convinced herself that all she's picking up from him are her own hopeless feelings, bouncing endlessly in a cage of mirrors, while he has an entire history with the SOE that he doesn't let anyone know because it sounds tricky and glamorous when recited out rapid-fire like a magician's patter (thanks, Doctor), but to him it just recalls all the young men and women he ran as agents until they died. He'd love to be proven wrong, to know there are ghosts after all; then he'd have someone to apologize to. And halfway through this plot that would make an entirely reasonable story all by itself (ghost of Nigel Kneale on the line, please hold), Clara and the Doctor drop in from the cold rainy night and it isn't that I object to the resolution of the mystery, I just didn't like how suddenly we hurtled into it. "The Crimson Horror" was even more frustrating, because it would have been brilliant as a two-parter. As presented, the mystery of Mrs. Gillyflower's Sweetville and its millenarian model community is half penny dreadful and half real horror, but none of it is allowed to breathe—the horror is flicked out of the way in the first fifteen minutes so as to get to the rest of the plot, meaning none of the genuinely chilling implications register as anything more than momentary shocks. The relationship between a scarred blind woman and a mute monster is a staple of the genre and reframing it between the daughter of a mad scientist and the half-paralyzed Doctor she has to hide from her mother is very clever, but it's over as soon as it's onscreen. (Points for casting Diana Rigg and Rachel Stirling as mother and daughter, but they don't get enough time to themselves, either.) The late-breaking revelation raises more questions than it answers, because it wasn't at all clear there was a question there to begin with. And I like Madam Vastra, Jenny, and Strax as an irregular gang of crime-fighters, observing just enough of Victorian custom to set off their casual queer alien comfort all the more, but they too vanish into the need to tie everything up by the forty-five-minute mark. It was a crowded sketch of something that should have been a classic. Yes, every episode we got little hints and whispers about Clara and the universe and Trenzalore and the Doctor's destiny, but that didn't excuse for me how insubstantial everything else around them appeared to be. It made for a very strange viewing experience. "Nightmare in Silver" was a great showcase for Matt Smith persona-switching at the slap of a face, but otherwise? Something? I couldn't find it.
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And it's really shortchanged the individual episodes. Of the half-season I saw, I liked "Hide" best: it slingshots the ending, but until then it's a very classic '70's BBC ghost story with a fragile romance that actually convinces me. As long as Caliburn House has existed, it's been haunted by the "Witch of the Well," a whitely screaming apparition with one hand outstretched, always appearing in the same pose—and from the same angle—no matter where in the house it's sighted. The place has become one of those daunting ruins approached only by ghost hunters or debunkers or exorcists, of which the latest pair are Alec Palmer and Emma Grayling: she's the mental medium and he handles the technical end of things and they are visibly, painfully in love with each other, but she's so skinlessly sensitive to emotions (and understandably withdrawn because of it) that she's convinced herself that all she's picking up from him are her own hopeless feelings, bouncing endlessly in a cage of mirrors, while he has an entire history with the SOE that he doesn't let anyone know because it sounds tricky and glamorous when recited out rapid-fire like a magician's patter (thanks, Doctor), but to him it just recalls all the young men and women he ran as agents until they died. He'd love to be proven wrong, to know there are ghosts after all; then he'd have someone to apologize to. And halfway through this plot that would make an entirely reasonable story all by itself (ghost of Nigel Kneale on the line, please hold), Clara and the Doctor drop in from the cold rainy night and it isn't that I object to the resolution of the mystery, I just didn't like how suddenly we hurtled into it. "The Crimson Horror" was even more frustrating, because it would have been brilliant as a two-parter. As presented, the mystery of Mrs. Gillyflower's Sweetville and its millenarian model community is half penny dreadful and half real horror, but none of it is allowed to breathe—the horror is flicked out of the way in the first fifteen minutes so as to get to the rest of the plot, meaning none of the genuinely chilling implications register as anything more than momentary shocks. The relationship between a scarred blind woman and a mute monster is a staple of the genre and reframing it between the daughter of a mad scientist and the half-paralyzed Doctor she has to hide from her mother is very clever, but it's over as soon as it's onscreen. (Points for casting Diana Rigg and Rachel Stirling as mother and daughter, but they don't get enough time to themselves, either.) The late-breaking revelation raises more questions than it answers, because it wasn't at all clear there was a question there to begin with. And I like Madam Vastra, Jenny, and Strax as an irregular gang of crime-fighters, observing just enough of Victorian custom to set off their casual queer alien comfort all the more, but they too vanish into the need to tie everything up by the forty-five-minute mark. It was a crowded sketch of something that should have been a classic. Yes, every episode we got little hints and whispers about Clara and the universe and Trenzalore and the Doctor's destiny, but that didn't excuse for me how insubstantial everything else around them appeared to be. It made for a very strange viewing experience. "Nightmare in Silver" was a great showcase for Matt Smith persona-switching at the slap of a face, but otherwise? Something? I couldn't find it.