fbpx
Doctor WhoTV

Doctor Who: Last Christmas by Steven Moffat (Doctor Who review).

Be careful: There may be spoilers but you might also be dreaming this and might have to read this again later when you wake up.

DW-LastChristmas-1

From the start of this episode question everything that you see because you don’t really know where the dreams start, begin or end. It’s pretty obvious that the dream crabs are surrogates for the face-huggers from ‘Alien’. Writer Steven Moffat doesn’t ignore it and with a list shown towards the end, there are at least five others although he misses out ‘Dreamscape’ with a touch of ‘Dead Of Night’. Considering a couple of them are at least ‘X’ rated, it does make me wonder if, for some children, they’ll be added to their list to watch and see the source at some point. If you are under 16, reading this, they are a lot scarier but only because you don’t wake up from them.

DW-LastChristmas-2

In many respects, after Clara meets Santa Claus, things go back to a sort of normal with scientists looking after four individuals who have creatures attached to their heads, although I have to confess I thought they were completely alien. It might have paid more to have not totally encased the heads but maybe then they’d have looked too much like face-huggers than crabs.

The twist that nothing should be trusted as being real was actually very clever and as that’s too much spoiler let’s jump past that. It does make me wonder how much of the reality distortion came from a certain Time Lord who must surely have a more complex brain to be digested.

In many respects, the fact that this story was set in December and with the Christmas attachment didn’t make it as sugary as other yuletide ‘Doctor Who’ stories have been. In fact, I suspect it will be classed as one of its more horrific ones and fans will be re-watching it to catch all the film inferences.

The ultimate finale is getting the Doctor and Clara back together for some more adventures. One can only hope that he doesn’t return her home after each adventure because that has become rather repetitive with companions in recent years.

A better than normal Moffat episode and one can only hope this continues into the next season even if in the extras only the next three episodes are completed as of yet.

Geoff Willmetts

December 2014

 

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.