Although the modern series of Doctor Who has featured various alien planets, there have been fewer examples of alien societies. There's been nothing like the Federation of Snakedance or the city of Shur in The Ribos Operation. It's rare now for the Doctor and his companion to soak up the atmosphere of said world. For once, fans have been granted this privilege, when the Doctor takes Clara on her first journey into space to the Rings of Akhaten, a society of seven worlds orbiting a sun, during their Festival of Offerings.
The arrival on Akhaten is the best part of the episode, giving a good sense of wonder. The opening shot of the alien Sun is an impressive piece of FX work from The Mill. Moments later, the Doctor is introducing Clara to a bazaar full of weird and wonderful alien beings. It's great to see so many monsters in one room, although many of them have probably been recycled from previous Doctor Who stories. I think I spotted the Hoix from Love and Monsters wearing the breathing apparatus of a Hath from The Doctor’s Daughter. I liked the Do’reen creature though, and It's always refreshing to see aliens that don't want to take over the world.
However, a fantastic location still needs a decent plot, and this is where the episode falters. In the market, Clara is separated from the Doctor and meets up with a young girl called Merry, also known as the Queen of Years, well played by a child actor who manages to seem sincere. Merry is being pursued by religious people in red robes. It transpires that the society of Akhaten trades in memories and stories. So Merry is to sing a song during the Festival which will keep an Old God in slumber. Using her experience with children, Clara convinces Merry to sing. When the Doctor and Clara attend the ceremony, Merry sings and is taken to the Temple. The quality of the CGI takes a dip at the point where the Doctor and Clara have to take a Speeder across to the Temple. For some reason they don’t need any kind of space suit or oxygen mask, and it is never made clear that there is supposed to be a vacuum in space.
The Doctor and Clara arrive at the Pyramid Temple, which when the plot really starts to fall apart. Inside the temple the Doctor and Clara, find Merry and a Chorister, in front of a glass case containing a Mummy on a throne. The Mummy is waking up. At this point episode turns into one long dialogue of exposition with the Doctor, Merry and the Chorister taking it in turns to explain what’s supposed to be happening. It turns out that Merry was always supposed to sacrifice her soul, or story, to the Old God.
Also present in the story is a group of creatures called the Vigil appear to take the sacrifice. I haven't mentioned them before and that is because they are almost irrelevant to the story. They are meant to be bringing Merry to the God as a sacrifice, but the people in red robes have already done this themselves.It is not clear where the Vigil come from, why they exist or how they came to do what they do.
Eventually the Mummy wakes and dies. It turns out that the Mummy is an alarm clock and not the God after all. The real God is the sun. Why did the natives need an alarm clock? It is never revealled. The Sun God appears to have a jack o'lantern face, making it look more ridiculous than scary.
The ending is a real mess. The Doctor sends Merry and Clara away from the Temple. All the aliens join Merry for a little singalong to appease the Sun God, which is as twee as it sounds. The Doctor appears to be sacrificing his memories to overfeed the Sun, but all it does is to drain his strength and his memories don’t seem to be affected. It takes Clara, using the leaf from her Journal of 101 Places to See. I don’t quite know why this is more effective than the Doctor’s memories.
Sadly, we don’t get to see what effect the Sun’s disappearance has on the inhabitants of Akhaten, as the scene cuts straight from the Sun’s defeat to the Doctor bringing Clara back to Earth. The only consolation is knowing that the inhabitants of Akhaten have returned the ring that Clara left earlier. It’s all very patchy. Perhaps a rewrite ended up losing some of the material.
This is a story that is more interesting in a magical sense, which Gods and stories. The stories thing also ties in with Clara’s backstory. Just as Clara’s leaf has a special story of bringing her parents’ together, so she herself is special and unique from the two other Claras.
Matt Smith continues to impress and gets a great Doctorish speech against the Sun God. He's also pretty funny in the Bazaar, and his high pitched barks with Do’reen are hilarious. The Doctor is more in the background this week. The mention his granddaughter is good. It is possible that Neil Cross intended to draw a parallel between the Doctor, as a Time Lord and the Grandfather Sun as two impossibly old things. But that’s not at all clear.
Clara continues to be well played by Jenna Louise Coleman. The Pre titles sequence reveals more about Clara’s history, but we learn slightly less about the girl herself. She appears to have led an ordinary life, but perhaps the falling leaf and chain of circumstances of circumstances leading to her parents meeting were coincidence? However, I’m more inclined to believe that whatever splits Clara into multiple people is something that happens in her future, possibly the Doctor unwittingly creating this.
Former showrunner Russell T Davies once said that audiences do not care about aliens from the planet Zog without human characters. He is right in some respects, as it is difficult to make audiences care about made up worlds. The Rings of Akhaten shows many of the pros and cons of the alien society storyline. In a way, Neil Cross' first Doctor Who episode is as ambitious and risky as The Web Planet was in 1965. In spite of its faults, I still find I quite like this episode. An ambitious failure is better than an unambitious one. In the end, this episode doesn’t quite live up to its potential, but I like what they were aiming for.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment