Review: Doctor Who: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (Or: Conclusive proof that Doctor Who is not even as good as Primeval)

Introduction

A short word before we dive into Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said this, but: I do not want to hate Doctor Who. My intense love for the Classic series, and for the Science Fiction genre in general, means I feel compelled to give each and every episode a genuine chance. In fact, I have only given up on Doctor Who once since 2005: at the start of the 2008 season, when I realised that a series that was phenomenally popular, and yet would cast Catherine Tate as the female lead, and feature as the alien menace in episode one the Adipose, a race solely designed to be sold in Toys’R’Us next to the Cabbage Patch Kids, was so pathetically desperate for commercial attention that it could no longer even properly defined as a television show.
As it is, my self-imposed Who exile only lasted a few weeks, tempted back as I was by a) the desire to see how stupid this shite could get (the answer is very: the climax to the entire season is Catherine Tate spinning a wheel) and b) Bernard Cribbins.
The point is, aside from this minor blip four years ago for the sake of my own mental health, I have never gone into an episode wanting to hate it, because I know how good the show can be. And I’m not just talking about the Classic stuff: remember, this is the same team that brought us Amy’s Choice and Night Terrors. Which is why it hurts when the show consistently turns up episodes like this one.
Already this year’s theme is becoming evident: Spectacle Over Substance. Or logic. Or common sense. Or characters that you don’t want to punch in the face every time they open their mouths and spew the inane infantile dialogue that makes you wish you were deaf. It’s pretty obvious that just as last week’s Asylum of the Daleks began life as an image in Moffat’s head of a million Daleks sitting around not doing anything except chant “Save us” when they don’t actually need saving, this week’s episode, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, was very obviously an episode purely written to fit the asinine title someone thought up after falling asleep watching Snakes on a Plane.
Why on Earth would anyone want to write a homage to Snakes on a Plane, anyway? What, you couldn’t think of a witty enough way to riff off of The Room?
Maybe the answers lie within the episode. (Spoilers: they don’t.)

The Episode

So, we begin in “Egypt, 1334 BC,” where we encounter the latest chapter in the oh-so-hilarious running ‘joke’ of famous women from throughout history finding Matt Smith sexually irresistible. Because this is what we want to see from Doctor Who, right? The Doctor becoming some kind of temporal Captain Kirk, bedding every historical woman from Helen of Troy to Margaret Thatcher?
…That’s going to be the season finale, isn’t it?
Anyway, this time, if such a thing were possible, it’s even worse, with Queen Nefertiti outright molesting the Doctor. Oh, those crazy women! All secretly gagging for it, am I right? Neffy here is so desperate for some royal action that, why, she’s trying to rape the man who just saved her life! Ho ho ho!
…Well, quite.

Nope, I'm sorry, I can't think of a caption. This is one of the worst things we as a species have ever produced, pure and simple.





Well, if you’ve been watching Who regularly for the last three years, you should know by now that there’s nothing new about the portrayal of women as the useless bit of flesh around a vagina. However, what’s different here is that this episode is, amazingly, not written by Steven Moffat, but by Chris Chibnall, most famous for being head writer on Torchwood, which those of you with long memories may remember as being the most humiliating thing to ever happen to the franchise until Sarah Jane Adventures started.
Fortunately, the Doctor gets an update from his Twitter feed, or something, which tells him something’s wrong in the far future. And just take a look at Nefertiti in this scene. This wise and noble queen, who led the Egyptian people for decades despite her gender, is so completely in heat that she can think of nothing else except grinding her body over everything in sight.
The worst thing about this approach is that it’s not even unique to the Moffat era. Remember Russell T Davies’ The End of Time, in which the Doctor, the greatest asexual fictional character of all time, admitted to having a sexual relationship with Queen Elizabeth the First (who he then ran away from) because he was bored? It baffles me that two separate show-runners could both come up with the idea that almost all famous women throughout history are nothing more than the Doctor’s personal sex toys? Because, hey, it’s not as if women have had a pretty rough time of it throughout almost all of human history, and anyone who even so much as made the history books deserves our utmost respect, is it?
This is why I was more confused than anything over the claims that Moffat was a misogynistic dinosaur over his interpretation of Irene Adler in this year’s Sherlock. Erm, yeah? Have you not been watching Who for the past two years?

I am fifteen seconds into this episode. I have written almost nine hundred words. God help me.

So, the scene jumps to the twenty- fourth century. Oh, God, I can hear my Star Trek DVDs calling to me from my bookshelf. We discover that a spaceship that looks like a load of small Swiss Rolls on cocktail sticks joined together is flying on an intercept course with the Earth. The Doctor converses with an army captain, played by the one member of the cast who clearly knows what utter tripe the episode is, and so delivers one of the most entertainingly bland and disinterested performances ever. Seriously, she looks like she couldn’t care less that her planet is about to be destroyed.

Meanwhile, Nefertiti is swanning around this military base completely unsupervised, displaying not a single iota of surprise that she had been transported four thousand years into the future. But, as we shall discover, it will very quickly become something of a theme for the episode for people to be totally uninterested in the existence of time travel. The Doctor looks at some readings which convince him to go and abduct a hunter played by Rupert Graves off of Sherlock, and Amy and Rory Pond-Williams-They’re going to be gone in three weeks and I couldn’t care less.
Now, the fact that he’s bringing Lestrade along strongly suggests that the readings Earth is getting off the probe tell him that there are creatures on board that he is going to need help dealing with. So, why, then, is he utterly astonished to discover dinosaurs on board not five minutes later?

Why, so we could end the cold open with a title-drop trailer-fodder exclamation of “Dinosaurs! On a spaceship!” Chibnall, you hack.

Anyway, before that, we get the Doctor admonishing Captain Couldn’t-Give-A-Monkey’s for wanting to shoot down the mysterious ship. Dude, the Earth could be destroyed. Get some perspective, man, and stop trying to prove your pacifist credentials, especially given what you’ll be doing before the end of the episode.
So, the Doctor picks up Lestrade, who gets to be sexist for the enjoyment of the audience, before kidnapping Amy, Rory and Rory’s dad Brian, without even asking them first. What a lovely guy our hero is, to be sure.
The Doctor is furious that Brian was accidentally brought along. “I’m not a taxi service, you know!”

The O RLY Owl is in fact a regular customer of TARDIS Taxis, the company set up by the Meddling Monk in order to pay off his gambling debts.

Doctor, can you ever hear yourself? You’ve gone around history grabbing a ragtag band of misfits who have nothing in common with each other, and one of whom will prove to be entirely useless on this mission, while your entire shtick for this season is that you endlessly take Amy and Rory on short trips to random places before depositing them back on Earth again 45 minutes later. So, yes, Doctor. You are a taxi service.
Oh, and Brian and the Doctor don’t recognise each other. I mean, it’s not as if they’d have met at the wedding. Oh, yeah, the writers have completely forgotten Amy and Rory are even married. The sooner they’re gone, the better, if this is how they’re treated.

So, everyone is issued with torches, the sole purpose of which is to be waved uncomfortably in everyone’s faces for the duration of the episode, and then we get the “Dinosaurs! On a spaceship!” line, and then we get the opening credits.

I’ve got used to the fact that the Smith era theme is the worst version in the entire 49 history of the Who tune, so it was only a matter of time before we got opening credits to match. In a nutshell:
-The vortex looks like it’s being cycled through a filter of every colour of the rainbow.
-The names of the cast could only look worse if they were in Comic Sans.
-The words “Doctor Who” are now filled in to resemble the skin of the monster of the week. Because when I tune in to Doctor Who, I want to feel as if I’m watching CBeebies.

Actually the whole “the logo resembles the monster of the week” thing is so nasty and cheap that I have no idea how nobody involved in the production of this series spotted how ridiculous it was. I mean, last week’s ‘Dalek’ logo just looked like polka dots, while this week’s ‘dinosaur logo’ looks like someone’s covered the title in astroturf.

So, we come back after the titles to find our intrepid band of assorted morons still fleeing from the dinosaurs. Nefertiti yells “in here!” upon which everyone… turns a corner into a different bit of corridor, so they’re clearly not going ‘in’ anywhere. As the dinosaurs approach, Lestrade suggests killing the dinosaurs before anyone gets hurt. Now, I’m all for the prevention of cruelty to animals and all that, but… well, the lives of six sapient people > the lives of two dumb beasts, in the books of anyone that’s sensible. So, of course, the Doctor stops him, showing his opposition to the second perfectly reasonable use of force within five minutes, which, again, is not such a good idea given the end of this episode.

So, some dodgy CGI happens, and the Doctor restarts the shipboard computer with his magic wand. The computer then does two things, and, I know this is hard, but see if you can spot the discrepancy between the two things the computer does.
1) Identifies the Doctor and co. as intruders that under no circumstances should be on board.
2) Immediately teleports  the Doctor, Rory and Brian to wherever they want to go.

No wonder Solomon killed the original crew so easily- their own computer is actively working against them…

Nefertiti, who, you’ll remember, has totally accepted the existence of time travel, space travel, and giant lizards who roamed the Earth millions of years before her theology says anything existed, chooses now to be totally astonished by the Doctor’s disappearance. Sure, why not.

Meanwhile, the Doctor, Rory and Brian are teleported to a windswept beach, and, I have to admit, at least before Chibnall reveals the true nature of this beach and ruins everything, this scene is actually pretty good. The Doctor is back to being his usual cheerful, goofy self, while both Rory and Brian get the chance to prove their competence. There’s plenty of good humour, and the three actors have great chemistry with one another.

Anyway, it can’t last, as we then cut to the episode’s villain, Solomon, who is delighted at the mention of a doctor. “After all this time,” he wheezes, evilly. Wait… so, how long exactly, have you just been lying around here uselessly waiting for someone to just happen to turn up? Oh, why do I even care? The line doesn’t mean anything, it’s just there to create false tension, making us think that Solomon is someone ominous, instead of just some space hobo.

"I was going to do something about the whole 'imminent death' thing, but then the Paralympics came on."

Meanwhile, Amy and the two useless guest stars are bumbling around, shining their torches in each other’s faces and threatening to kill each other. I can see this intrepid trio are going to prove their worth time and time again over the next half-hour. Amy asks Nefertiti her name, to which the Queen spews out a meaningless string of titles, as if she expects people from three and a half thousand years in the future to give a rat’s arse. Unfortunately for the audience, she’s right, as Amy apparently has a massive obsession with ancient Egypt that has never been mentioned before now, and so spends the rest of the episode fawning over the delightful attempted rapist.

Anyway, we then discover that Dumb, Dumber and Officially Brain-Dead were so caught up in their petty bickering that they failed to notice a sleeping Tyrannosaurus until they were literally almost standing on it. So, with Amy and Queen Bucket-head on one side and Lestrade on the other, he naturally simply walks around the dinosaur and they continue on their way.

Oh, no, I’m sorry. I mean he jumps over the creature’s open mouth. He then introduces himself as Riddell, a game hunter. Amy scoffs at him for not being as famous as Nefertiti. Well, yeah, but in terms of which of them is actually any use whatsoever on a ship full of vicious creatures that want to kill you, I don’t think there’s much of a contest.

So easily missed. I'm forever tripping over my ten foot long dinosaurs, aren't you?

Anyway, back with the tolerable characters, we find ourselves in the middle of an intolerable piece of plotting. The beach is, apparently, the engine room. Despite the fact that we can see the damn sky. I mean, never mind the fact that Chibnall seems to think that hydroelectricity could power a spaceship this size, that’s clearly bollocks. But that, instead of building a proper hydroelectricity generator, the makers of the  ship built a giant beach? And then gave it its own weather system? I mean… what?
Anyway, I’m getting worked up over nothing, because I might as well just ignore the whole beach sequence, given that it has no bearing on the rest of the episode whatsoever. This is just pointless padding, pure and simple. The Doctor, Rory and Brian are attacked by Pterodactyls, everyone runs away, the audience tries to ignore the fact that Pterodactyls were around a good eighty million years before Tyrannosauruses, blah, blah, blah.

The upshot of this is that the Doctor, Rory and Brian end up in a cave, where they are confronted by two robots, voiced by…

I’m too old for this shite.

Voiced by David Mitchell and Robert Webb. I couldn’t make this up if I tried, mainly because I’m not a sodding moron. Y’know, when Hale and Pace made a cameo appearance in the 1989 story Survival, it really worked, because it wasn’t just a case of ‘hey, look, it’s a famous double act in this story.’ Their roles tied in very solidly with the central themes of the narrative. Sure, all they did was show up as a pair of shopkeepers telling dark jokes, but their purpose was so that the Doctor could make a comment about the black humour and get to the dark heart of the human condition, tying in with the themes of internal savagery and human ruthlessness.
Here… well, they’re not even playing proper characters. Mitchell and Webb are playing… Mitchell and Webb. It’s some ridiculous, camped- up mixture of all their most famous characters, which can be summed up as: “Look! Look! It’s Mitchell and Webb! We’ve got Mitchell and Webb! We must be brilliant, because we’ve got Mitchell and Webb! Like us! Please, please, like us!”

Meanwhile, Amy psychically knows how to work the ship’s computer, which enables her to see an image of the true owners of the ship… The Silurians!
Admittedly, this would have been far more effective a surprise had my sister not seen the episode before me and promptly told me the Silurians were in this one. Thanks, sis.
But, let me tell you, if I hadn’t be warned in advance, I’d never have guessed in a million years that this ship belonged to the Silurians. Why? Because the Silurians don’t have space travel. That’s a fundamental part of the Silurian mythos: they couldn’t leave Earth, so they went underground. But who cares about any of that nasty continuity stuff? We’ve got dinosaurs! On a spaceship!

So, anyway, Mitchell and Webb are marching around shouting things like “You’re going straight on the naughty step!” Kill me now. Someone, please end my pain.
We also learn something else that I missed the first time I watched this episode, which is that Solomon and the robots have been on the ship for two thousand years. Really. REALLY. Solomon has been on board the ship for two thousand years, with no apparent food or water, with his legs smashed to hell, in intense pain all the while.

Sure. Whatever. Oh, let’s just move on to watching something a bit more palatable. Like, apparently, Rory’s dad having his crotch licked by a Triceratops. The Doctor asks if Brian has anything in his trousers. “Only my balls,” comes the reply.

Darvill has written the number of days until his contract expires on the palm of his hand to help him through scenes like this.

…Right. That’s it. Chibnall still thinks he’s writing Torchwood. We’re all doomed.

No, Brian is talking about his golf balls. What else did you think he meant, on a primetime children’s TV show? So, he throws the golf balls, and naturally, because this is fiction, the Triceratops follows them. Triceratops, dogs; they’re all the same, really.

Meanwhile, the actress portraying Nefertiti is still delivering every line like she’s in the middle of foreplay and is about to ravish someone here and now, which, given the way she’s looking at Lestrade, might not be too far from the truth. I swear, after River Song, Season 31 Amy, Liz Ten, Signora Calvierri, Idris and now this, if I have to sit through another breathy-voiced, snake-hips, pouty, ‘seductive’ performance in Doctor Who, I shall scream. Is this really how Moffat and co think women behave? Don’t answer that.

Amy ignores them and asks the computer to display an image of the ship. The computer, clearly desperate to advance the meagre plot, also helpfully displays an image of Solomon’s ship docked next to the Silurian ship, even though that’s not what Amy asked for.

After a truly embarrassing CGI shot, we cut to the Doctor being taken into Solomon’s presence. As I’ve already mentioned, if we listen to what Mitchell and Webb said earlier, he’s been sitting here, bleeding heavily… for two thousand years. I genuinely don’t know what to make of this. Anyway, Solomon thinks the Doctor is asking too many questions, so he orders Mitchell to injure Brian, because he’s eeeevil. Mitchell shoots Brian in the right shoulder, which naturally injures him in the left shoulder, and Rory treats it with various medical tools he’s picked up from various times the TARDIS has visited. That’s… genuinely one of the most useful, competent approaches to being a time traveller we’ve ever seen in the show. It makes perfect sense that it would only be brought up three weeks before Rory leaves the show.

Anyway, on the other end of the competency spectrum, Amy finally remembers that she can just phone Rory to find out where he is (what are the chance that they both have the same mobile phones they had all those years ago when they were travelling with the Doctor? I know people who compulsively replace their phones every few months), and does so, while the Doctor questions Solomon, not two minutes after Solomon promised that if he asked any more questions, Brian would be killed. But why should we expected something as complex as continuity between consecutive scenes from this series anymore? 

Anyway, so Solomon says he’s on his way to the 'Broxbourne peninsula' (he’s lying! Broxbourne isn’t on a peninsula, it’s just off the M25!)… or presumably he means was, two thousand years ago… look, what was the point of the two thousand years thing if it’s blatantly untrue?!
Solomon scans the Doctor with a thingy, which comes up blank, since Time Lords presumably aren’t in his database, the Doctor declares himself worthless, and they just leave it at that. What?! Solomon, not only have you just for all intents and purposes discovered a new species, your scanner must be able to pick up how well-evolved the Doctor’s physiology is, what with the binary vascular system, the latent telepathy, the regenerative abilities… and you say he’s not worth anything? Fine, that’s it. You deserve what’s coming to you.

Amy lets the Doctor know what she’s discovered, and to give them credit, it’s nice to see the companion doing all the discovering for a change, even if she did just get it all off the computer.

So, the Doctor questions the guy who threatened to kill the Doctor’s friends if he asked any more questions, who then… readily tells him everything. It turns out Solomon ejected the crew of the ship into space (because apparently mindless, untameable beasts= profit, whereas a potential slave race is of no value whatsoever), but doesn’t know how to pilot the vessel. And he has made no effort to learn how to do it in all the years- you know what? Forget it. Forget about the whole ‘Solomon’s been here two thousand years’ thing, because the episode clearly has. Mitchell-bot was lying. That’s the only explanation. And if there had been a Lee Mack-bot to hand, he could have told us that straight away.

“The creatures aboard this ship are not objects to be sold or traded!” hisses the Doctor. I get where he’s coming from, but… but… they’re animals. In fact, this episode has already tried to draw parallels between a Triceratops and a modern dog. Is the Doctor saying that people shouldn’t own dogs, either?

Anyway, so the Doctor threatens Solomon and tells him to get off the ship before Earth attacks, to which Solomon orders Mitchell and Webb to kill the Doctor, Rory and Brian.

Oh, no, I’m sorry. I mean he just lets them walk out of there. Mitchell and Webb eventually give chase, but are old and slow and useless and don’t belong in this show, and so don’t catch the Doctor, who chooses, as his getaway vehicle, the Triceratops. Yes, this noble and majestic creature, which definitely shouldn’t be used for anyone’s personal gain, except right now, when I’m using it for my personal gain! Whee!

So, by chucking Brian’s endless supply of golf balls for the creature to follow, the Doctor and co escape on their galloping Triceratops.

A galloping Triceratops. This show has officially bottomed out.

After escaping, the Doctor finds a computer that is receiving a message from Earth… somehow, where Captain Couldn’t-Care-Less announces that the ship “is entering the atmosphere,” and that she must fire the missiles. Well, if the ship is already entering the atmosphere, then the missiles will achieve precisely zero, since the debris will just fall to Earth anyway and kill everyone, an impact that should occur in about five seconds anyway. I mean, really, Chibnall? “Entering the atmosphere”? Really?

"This ship contains the most precious cargo... which I've just been using as my own personal funfair."

Anyway, so Earth control prepares to fire the missiles ‘immediately,’ so naturally we won’t hear from them again until the end of the episode. Meanwhile, Lestrade just happens to find a cupboard with two massive guns inside just sitting in the middle of a corridor. It’s revealed that the guns fire electric stun bolts (which Amy calls “anaesthetic” for some bizarre reason) and, okay, Chibnall, did you just really, really want to write an episode of Primeval or something? Because if you want to just go away and write for something else, believe me, I have no problem with that.

Nefertiti asks if the Doctor “has a queen,” with the leer of an unshaven man in a dirty raincoat standing staring from a distance at the school gate that we’ve come to expect from her. Lestrade voices the opinion that she needs “a man of action! Someone with a very large weapon!” And we’re straight back in Torchwood territory again. Great. Just great.

Meanwhile the Doctor and Rory are astonished that the primitive cryogenic ark built by a species that barely had space travel possesses no advanced weapons. Just then, Solomon and the robots teleport in, even though the Doctor said earlier that the teleports were burnt out.

Solomon has finally worked out that the dinosaurs won’t actually, y’know, fit on his ship, but has a Plan B!

And get ready, because we are only now getting to the single stupidest thing in this episode.

Solomon has scanned the ship, and discovered a unique object, one that he wants to sell on for himself: Queen Nefertiti of Egypt.

Okay, stop. Stop. Right. There. Solomon’s scanners can identify that this woman is the Queen Nefertiti, someone who died four thousand years previously? Are we supposed to assume that his databanks have stored on there every person who ever lived from a planet he’s not even ever been to?! And what makes Nefertiti so damn ‘unique,’ anyway? She’s not in her own time, she’s not in Egypt… which makes her just some random woman, just like anyone else! And assuming Solomon does somehow just know that this is Nefertiti, presumably because he just read the script, who’s going to believe him?! “Oh, yes, this is Queen Nefertiti, most definitely!” “Hasn’t she been dead for four thousand years?” “Incredible, isn’t it? She doesn’t look a day over six hundred!” “Sod off, Solomon. This is just some random chick wearing a shower curtain for a cloak and a giant slushie cup for a hat.”

So, yeah. It’s Nefertiti. So what? And why the hell are you obsessing over a woman who’s been dead for four thousand years when the very fact that she’s here at all means that you’ve just discovered time travel?! Don’t you think that would be a bit more valuable?!

But, no. The robots kill the Triceratops… I think we’re supposed to care about that, but it’s hard to say, before Amy, Lestrade and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert transport in using those teleport controls that were so irreparably damaged a few minutes ago.

Nefertiti announces that she will go with Solomon to save everybody else. Lestrade points his gun at Solomon, but under threat of Mitchell and Webb, he stands down. “My bounty increases,” breathes our paper-thin villain. Er, no, it really hasn’t. It’s gone from forty nine previously extinct species of animal to one girl on her way to a fancy dress party. I don’t exactly think you’ll be topping any rich lists any time soon.

What are the chances that this is the actual Mitchell and Webb, having downloaded their consciousnesses into robotic bodies, a process that left them completely insane?

So, Solomon tells Nefertiti “I will break you in with immense pleasure.” My sister was greatly offended by the fact that Solomon is very overtly promising to rape Nefertiti here, upon which I directed her back to the fact that the first scene in the episode depicts Nefertiti herself trying to rape the Doctor. A terrible example of double standards, which I shall choose to generously attribute to the fact that Chris Chibnall is a very silly man.

Solomon demands that the computer teleport them back to his ship, and the computer not only still has the broken teleport working, but psychically knows exactly who Solomon wants teleported with him.

Anyway, as will shortly become clear, all this unpleasantness is just a lazy way of justifying what the Doctor does next. He uses the teleport (incidentally, the Silurians have always been depicted as being technologically a long way off developing anything as advanced as a teleport, yet, here it is) to take everyone else to the control deck, where the Doctor frets that there are only seventeen minutes before the missiles hit. Seventeen minutes. Even though the ship is apparently already in the atmosphere.
The Doctor magnetises the hull (yeah, Silurian technology can do that, too! They had an awful lot of stuff lying around that they’ve never bothered to use until now, haven’t they?) to keep Solomon’s ship stuck to it, while Lestrade and Amy get to pretend they’re in Primeval for the day. The guns even make the same sounds as the blasters from Primeval. What are Brian and Rory doing while all this is going on?
Well, it turns out that the ship needs two pilots before it can even think about changing course. Before you have time to consider what might happen if a disaster left only one crewmember alive, it gets worse. Not only does the ship need two pilots, it needs two pilots from the same family. Christ, these people were just begging to go extinct, weren’t they? Why the hell would the system ever work like this? Even forgetting all the questions of what might happen if daddy Silurian needed to pop to the loo or something, this is a survival ark with a limited number of people aboard. In order to continue the species after the predicted extinction event, the Silurians chosen for the mission would have as diverse a genetic spread as possible, i.e. taking people from the same family along would be the last thing they’d do.

While the Doctor is ripping pieces of the computer out to, erm, make using it easier, we get the character moment of the episode, where Amy talks about how the gaps between the Doctor’s visits are getting longer, and she’s worried one day he may stop coming altogether. Very nice, I wish I cared. Moving on…

Has anyone else noticed that Murray Gold's usual abysmal soundtrack has now been replaced with a single generic all purpose 'action' theme? Not that I'm complaining; the less pieces of music Gold writes, the better off the world is for it.

The Doctor removes a thing that looks like one of those yellow chunks you used to find in public urinals, and teleports out without even announcing his destination. Once again, the computer is clearly desperate to get the episode over and done with. Amy then gets back to fighting the dinosaurs, saying she can’t wait for them to “go back to being extinct.” Great, even the regulars have forgotten whatever message this episode was trying to make. Meanwhile, Rory and Brian fly the spaceship, complete with Brian shouting “me, me, me,” just if you weren’t confused enough about how two people can fly a spaceship together as if it was an aeroplane.

The Doctor arrives on Solomon’s ship and immediately kills Mitchell and Webb by disconnecting some of their wires. Y’know, if he could do that all along, he could really have saved everyone a lot of bother by destroying them at the beginning of the episode. So Solomon holds a tiny torch up to Nefertiti’s throat, but she kicks his crutches away, knocking him down and allowing her to turn the tables. “I am not your possession!” she snarls. Judging by her shocked behaviour since Solomon abducted her, I’m convinced she actually had no idea what she was letting herself in for when she agreed to be his slave. I mean, it’s not as if she’s from a culture almost entirely centred around slavery, is it?

So, the Doctor uses the urinal cake to send out a false sensor image to the missiles, causing them to believe Solomon’s ship is the Silurian ark, before demagnetising the hull and callously leaving Solomon to be blown up when the missiles impact.

Now, this has already become the big talking point of the episode, and here’s my two cents. The Doctor has, many times in the past, killed. But it’s always been as a last resort, in a moment of extreme desperation. It’s never been so… premeditated. Indeed, when the Doctor does purposely set out to kill someone, he’s always been shown to be unable to go through with it- an excellent example of this is his attempted assassination of Davros in Resurrection of the Daleks. I mean, we’re talking about Davros here, the most evil guy in the universe! But the key difference is that Eric Saward is a brilliant writer who actually had Davros talk the Doctor down. Solomon, on the other hand, is nowhere near as erudite, as Chibnall has been forced to write him as the most ghastly, repugnant thug imaginable just to get the Doctor into this contrived situation in the first place.

Oh, and the Doctor has never killed anyone so cheerfully, either. When the Fifth Doctor had to kill someone, he had a small breakdown. When the Sixth and Seventh were forced to use lethal force, they both took time to philosophically reflect on their actions- the Sixth covering up his sadness with black humour, the Seventh contemplating the deeper mysteries of time. Even the Tenth got to cry for a bit, although by his last few episodes, I’m not entirely convinced David Tennant’s face wasn’t just stuck in that position. The Eleventh, on the other hand, just does the same clowning, ebullient shtick he does in every other situation.

So, we cut back to Amy and Lestrade, who are standing over the bodies of a dozen Raptors, several of whom are still twitching as painful bolts of electricity crackle over their bodies. Erm, were those things stun guns, or torture devices?

The Doctor prepares to take everyone back to their respective homes, but first Brian asks a favour: to be shown the Earth from orbit. And am I the only one that’s a bit disappointed that Brian didn’t get to become a full time companion? I mean, he’s practical, resourceful, good-humoured, and has a genuine sense of wonder about him that Karen Gillan’s Amy has, bewilderingly, never shown of glimmer of. I say ‘Karen Gillan’s Amy’ because, of course, the last person I said ‘can’t they become a companion?’ of was Caitlin Blackwood’s little Amelia Pond. And yes, I’m still bitter about getting Gillan over Blackwood.

Why, Who? Why do we have to sit through 45 minutes of bilge before we can enjoy moments like this?

We cut to Lestrade, back home in his own time, staring at the stars. And, as a final ‘screw you’ to anything even resembling common sense, he’s now sharing his tent with Queen Nefertiti.
So, Queen Nefertiti has been taken out of her time a good four years before history says she dies to go and spend the rest of her life in the early twentieth century. Oh, and for good measure, she’s brought a laser rifle from the twenty fourth century with her.
Why was Queen Nefertiti of ancient Egypt even in this episode, anyway? Her being Queen Nefertiti only has any bearing on anything in the most tenuous of ways, and even then in a way that makes no sense whatsoever. She neither did anything useful throughout the entire story, nor taught the audience anything about ancient Egypt, except possibly that they were all rapists back then. In fact, the one and only thing Nefertiti brings to this episode is to remind me of the Big Finish Audio companion Erimem.
See, Erimem is a female Pharaoh, who travels with the Fifth Doctor and Peri after discovering that history does not remember her. She is a wise and mature young woman who brings a sense of regal dignity to everything she does, and frequently fully throws herself into the time and place they have landed in. She’s my second favourite non-TV companion, only because Sixth Doctor audio companion Evelyn Smythe is so completely awesome, and just thinking about Erimem makes me realise that after having to sit through Dinosaurs on a Spaceship twice now, I’m going to have to listen to Son of the Dragon to make myself feel clean again.

And, as a final coda to the episode, it’s revealed that Brian’s experiences have encouraged him to travel the world. It’s actually quite endearing, in a goofy way.
Not worth sitting through this episode to get to, thought.

In Conclusion
Why Chris Chibnall? Why hire the man who made Torchwood… well, Torchwood for not one, but two episodes this series? Plot threads are picked up and then forgotten about willy-nilly, the humour is the usual Torchwood level of ‘these-two-people-are-talking-about-having-sex-and-that’s-funny-because-I-say-it-is,’ the entire forty-five minute episode is engineered to fit that stupid title, the guest cast are hideously misjudged, apart from the always brilliant Rupert Graves and the wonderfully endearing Mark Williams, and the kindest thing to say is that at least it’s not as messy as a Steven Moffat episode.
As I mentioned last week, I don’t care about continuity cock-ups as much as I care about overall quality. Therefore, I can choose to let the whole ‘Silurians suddenly have spaceflight and teleports’ thing slide, even if I do feel that it entirely misses the point of core tragedy of the Silurians, that they need mankind to help their race survive, but neither species is accommodating enough to be able to let that happen. This episode, however, reveals that the Silurians could have just up and left the planet any time they damn well pleased. But, as I said, I can choose to be generous and let that slide.

However, even without that, there’s no denying it’s a mess. Almost every bad episode of Who these days tends to be accentuated by at least one utter horrible, nails-on-blackboard performance, and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship has three. One is obviously Riann Steele as Nefertiti, while the other two are… well, I hate to say it, but it’s Mitchell and Webb. Two performances badly misjudged on every level, which can be summed up as ‘Sadistic rapist has two yellow comedy robot sidekicks who act like whiny three year olds.’ Can you spot the discrepancy?

Next time on Doctor Who: the show’s first visit to the Wild West since 1966’s The Gunfighters. But before that, the blog returns later in the week, when I’ll be taking a look at CBBC’s brand new supernatural drama Wolfblood.