… here’s a short, but brilliantly insightful review of Fires of Pompeii

In short:  Interesting.  But could have been more.

I’ll be honest here, this review in particular will be an amalgam of my own thoughts and stuff that other people have said.  Yeah, it’s a pretty crap tactic for a reviewer to steal the best bits of thinking and insight from his mates.  But sometimes, you can’t avoid the truth, even if you didn’t think of it first.

So, if you’re a mate of mine and read this and think, shit I only just said that to Mondy a few hours ago and he isn’t even attributing the quote to me, well,  I’m not sorry at all.  Just rude.

Anywho, I thought Fires of Pompeii was a good story let down by two things.  Colin Teague and Murray Gold.  Colin simply doesn’t know when to stop swooping and zooming and skewing with his camera.  Probably the best scene in the story, the bit where the two prophets are dueling it out, is undermined by all these skewed angles of the two prophets.  It’s all a matter of taste, of course, and I know some people who think that Colin is the bees knees.  But not me.  And Fire of Pompeii didn’t change my mind.

As for Murray, well normally I think he’s great.  Allot of fandom – well some of fandom, well some of the vocal bits of fandom, well some of the vocal and scary bits of fandom – really loathe everything that Murray stands for.  I just think he over does it a bit and when he gets it wrong, he gets it very wrong.  All that twinkly, piddly music at the beginning and when the Doctor is breaking into Phil Davis’ house was all just a bit… not right for the moment.  That said, he did make us care with his music toward the end of the episode, so it wasn’t all bad from Murray.*

As for the story.  Well, it’s heart was in the right place.  I love the moral core of it.  I love that the Doctor’s choice is so totally cruel and horrible.  And I love that Donna – and by the way, Catherine Tate you are a breath of fresh air and probably the best companion ever – is so forthright and refuses to give into the Doctor’s whole Web of Time, fixed point, I’m a Time Lord and only I know what’s right, shtick.

It all does get a bit confusing at times, and as one of my mates correctly pointed out, the sisterhood are totally irrelevant to the core plot of the story.  I’m also not sure how the stone circuits were meant to transfer the power of the volcano into an escape pod and then back out into Pompeii transforming the populace in stone and boiling the water.  But, I never get the technical stuff anyway.

And, for the most part, it doesn’t really matter.  As much as the CGI rock monsters looks cool, they’re mostly irrelevant to the story.  Because, what the story is about is the choice that the Doctor has to make and Donna, like many a companion before, coming to terms that traveling with the Doctor isn’t all adventures and smiles.  I just wish – as another of my mates said – that the story had been more about that then the alien invasion of the week stuff.  Still, the destruction of Pompeii was brilliantly realised.

Oh, and Tennant did gabble a bit this week, didn’t he?  His angry was just silly.

There’s more to say.  For example Peter Capaldi stole the show.  Phil David was OK, but looked increasingly uncomfortable in the role.  The sisterhood were a bit silly and the Coda was totally redundant – with some of the worst dialogue of the episode.  Actually, I seem allot more negative about the episode then I actually felt when watching it.  Because I did think that this was a good story which didn’t really flinch from the central moral question, even if the Doctor did save the family – which in the context of the piece and Donna’s tears – made perfect sense.

So, I did enjoy it, but I thought it could have been so much better,

For me it’s a 7.5 out of 10.

* Yes, I know he emotionally manipulates us with his music.  But I like that in a score.  I want it too push me over the edge and make me blub like a very sad panda.

The trailer for next week, though, looks great.