You can't go wrong with a good witch hunt.
Well, the Author's Message is back, but it gets a bit closer to a
happy medium here; yes, there are simple Good and Bad people, but
there's just a little bit more to the story than that.
The idea that you shouldn't interfere with history only happens when
it's convenient to the plot, of course; and this episode makes that
particularly obvious, with all that objection to the witch-crazes and
the dismissal of women… but hey, that's history too, isn't it? And
from the perspective of a time traveller, "now" and "the distant
future" are surely also history that you shouldn't change… aren't
they? (The thing that The Waters of Mars got more or less right.)
Still, that's not the story we'll get today. It starts off as a pretty
effective historical, with creepiness and hinting and deduction… and
then it goes full-on monster at the start of the third act, and all
the interesting personality stuff is forgotten in favour of things
that make megalomanic speeches between going "rar". Ho hum, yet more
alien nasties imprisoned on Earth; was that it? It doesn't seem to
have any thematic connection to the first two acts, and so it rather
drops the dramatic arc that was being established.
Before that, it works pretty well – all right, we may wonder why a
random landowner would expect to recognise King James, and how he
would manage to travel without a retinue; but with a very hammy
performance including crypto-gayness just barely crypto enough that
the BBC can deny it when someone has a go at them for it, Alan Cumming
does a decent job of providing a combination of comic relief and an
effective mundane threat.
Like last week's, this isn't an episode for the ages; but it's
reasonable workmanlike Who, always bearing in mind that this is
meant to be a children's programme, and the sort of complex
storytelling I'm ideally looking for and the old series sometimes
managed just doesn't fit into the format any more – especially when
you have to explain everything for the hard of thinking (which most
children I've met aren't, but the BBC apparently feels the need). Even
so, replacing the alien menace with something a bit more interesting
(and less rushed-feeling), as it might have been some sort of
paranoia-generating effect, would have made for a more fitting third
act.
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