The story kicks off with a speedy sequence of time jumps, as the Doctor hops around history picking up a Scooby Doo gang of characters to join him on his latest adventure. There’s the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, Edwardian explorer Riddell, and of course Amy and Rory (plus an unexpected guest in the form of Rory’s dad Brian, whom the TARDIS materialises around while he’s busy changing a light bulb). Without wasting any time, the episode gets right to the meat of the matter; the dinosaurs themselves, rendered with excellent CGI, who appear before the titles have even rolled, trapped aboard an ancient spacecraft on a crash course with Earth.
It seems like the set-up for a fun, simplistic but enjoyable episode, but unfortunately there are several flaws in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, which let the story down and make it feel like a huge missed opportunity. Its biggest issue is the unevenness of the tone - one minute, The Doctor, Rory and Brian are comically riding a Triceratops as a method of escape while bickering robots (voiced by comedy duo Mitchell and Webb) chase behind them; the next, that same Triceratops is brutally gunned down by the robots, just so Solomon - their melodramatically malicious commander - can make a point. Portrayed by David Bradley, Solomon was another weak point in this story for me, his villainy and malevolence seeming decidedly over the top and unnecessary. When the Doctor doesn’t immediately help fix the pirate’s injured legs, he has the robots shoot at Brian as a form of coercion. Surely, not a smart move to anger the only man who can mend his crippling injuries? On many occasions it felt as though Bradley and the script were trying too hard to make Solomon seem despicable and evil, and although that plays into a moment towards the end of the episode that I’ll talk about later, it felt extremely out of place in an otherwise light-hearted story.
Though Bradley’s character was a little unsuitable for such a cheery episode, Mark Williams fitted in perfectly with his depiction of Brian. A practical, somewhat sheltered man, his interactions with Rory provided more than one heartwarming moment throughout the story, helped out enormously by the wonderful chemistry between Williams and Darvill, who honestly do feel like father and son here. Whilst I was expecting a lot more of the relationship-building between the two, the moments we did get (piloting the ship together, ‘it’s all about the pockets in this family’, Brian getting over his fear of travelling) really helped build up the character. I’m looking forward to seeing him return later this series in The Power of Three, where hopefully we’ll gain a little bit more of an insight into his developing relationship with the Ponds, now he knows the truth about their ‘travelling in Thailand’.
Unfortunately, not everybody in the Doctor’s new gang is given as much development and screen time as Brian. While the Doctor is hanging around with Williams senior and junior, Amy is left to explore the ship’s upper levels with Riddell and Nefertiti; this provided for some great dialogue (‘And you, Amy? Are you also a queen?’ ‘Yes. Yes I am.’) and several of their antics had me grinning, such as Riddell awkwardly hopping across a sleeping T-Rex and chuckling as he goes, but sadly neither of these new characters were given much of importance to do, aside from flirt with each other. Riddell’s sole contribution to the group seems to be shooting at things, and Nefertiti’s only real role as a character is to get taken hostage by Solomon in the final act. Though she handles it with a great deal of gusto, and her self-sacrifice for the sake of the dinosaurs is inspiring, the moment is very quickly glossed over and it left me feeling cheated that we got to spend so little time with two potentially very interesting characters.
This under-use of Rupert Graves and Riann Steele is not, I think, the only part of the episode that was mishandled. There were several moments throughout the story that I felt, had they been treated differently, could have made the story much more exciting. Although it was a great ‘ooh!’ moment when the ship was revealed to be Silurian in origin, the Silurians themselves were never really given much of an explanation; to casual viewers, it must have seemed rather baffling that a race of lizard people had inexplicably built an ark for the dinosaurs. With a little more exposition in the Silurian’s dialogue, this confusion could easily have been avoided. Furthermore, the Silurian’s line about ‘all but one of the species are thriving and ready to repopulate’ was something I immediately picked up on - what is the one species in particular that isn’t coping within the artificial environment of the ship, and why not? - but then that plot thread was dropped, and never mentioned again. Perhaps after Asylum of the Daleks, where several innocuous lines turned out to be vital clues (‘where do you get the milk?’), I’m just reading too much into the dialogue, but nonetheless I felt disappointed that this wasn’t picked up on later in the story.
Moreover, there were several plot points, minor and major, that felt just a little bit too convenient to be believable. The biggest example is the spaceship’s controls, which could only be controlled by two people ‘with the same gene code’. If this fact had been dropped in earlier on, perhaps during Solomon’s discussion with the Doctor in the medical bay, then it might have been a little bit less jarring when Rory ‘just so happens’ to have brought his dad along on this occasion. That wasn’t the only thing that threw me about this scene, as I also thought it was rather slow of the Doctor to not pick up immediately on the fact that Brian and Rory would share a gene code. I just feel that overall some of the exposition in this story was a little rushed, and that it wouldn’t have taken anything more than a few quick rewrites to remove many of the small, irritating issues with this episode.
In terms of the overarching story of the season, we do get a lovely little nugget of a scene where the Doctor and Amy discuss how their journeys together are becoming more and more infrequent, and a moment of foreshadowing for Amy and Rory’s imminent departure. More imposing, however, is the Doctor’s final scene with Solomon; the Doctor teleports away from the pirate’s escape ship, leaving him at the mercy of the Indian Space Agency’s heavy weaponry. This ruthless, merciless act on the Doctor’s behalf seems very dark and out of character for Eleven; however, I suspect that this new aspect of his character will be explored in detail, in next week’s A Town Called Mercy. This scene is most likely why writer Chris Chibnall felt the need to make Solomon such a downright evil character, so the Doctor could feasibly be driven to leaving him to die.
I’ve been quite critical of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, so let me say to finish off that I didn’t hate this episode. There were, after all, plenty of great concepts and moments - the beach engine room, Amy and Riddell fighting off Velociraptors, Brian dangling his legs out into space as he tucks into a sandwich. But, equally so, there were the scenes that just didn’t sit right. The humour of the two robots, which often fell flat, and the Triceratops’ ridiculous obsession with Brian’s golf balls (Seriously? The ‘grassy residue’ on the balls was enough to make a fully grown dinosaur gallop after them in hunger?). The reason I’m being rather harsh on this story is because I can feel the potential here, the great romp of an episode that lies underneath the niggling flaws and whiplashing tone. Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is a troubled story, and it deserved to be better than it turned out to be. Still; it’s better than golf.
If you enjoyed this review, please consider following me on tumblr or twitter, or reading my review of last week’s Asylum of the Daleks. I'm actually very happy to say that this is my landmark 50th post on this blog! I've been doing this since last June, and - aside from the whole 'five month hiatus' from April to September - I think I've been doing okay. Here's to fifty more posts! Thank you for reading, and feel free to leave a comment letting me know what you thought.
Wow, that was a great review, never knew you were that good at blogging! ;)
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