Doctor Who Series 2 Episode 10 - Love & Monsters - Review

Starring: David Tennant, Billie Piper, Marc Warren & Peter Kay

Written By: Russell T Davies

Directed By: Dan Zeff

 

Since Doctor Who’s revival last year, there haven’t been many episodes I can call utterly bad. Yes, there are some like The Long Game and New Earth, but even these episodes have some redeemable qualities. However, now we have Love & Monsters to add into the mix. Right … after watching it umpteen times for the purposes of this review, I don’t know what the living hell I've just watched. Was that Doctor Who? Did the BBC accidentally broadcast the wrong programme? Join me, as I have more fun by ripping Love & Monsters to shreds, than I actually did in watching the episode.

 

Love & Monsters is an episode unlike any other (thank God!). This is largely down to the fact that the Doctor and Rose barely feature in it at all. Instead, this story is told through Elton Pope’s point of view. This episode documents Elton's life - his mother dying at a young age, and after numerous alien incursions, discovering the Doctor. Through the internet, he discovers others who have had experiences with the Doctor and they form a small group, where they meet each week to discuss him. Over time, the group starts enjoying other activities, and even end up becoming a musical group. However, their attention is brought back to the Doctor, when the mysterious Victor Kennedy shows up.

 

By telling the story through the point of view of another, some might think that this is a refreshing change from what we may have come to expect, but in the way it's handled here, it's anything but that. Telling the story through Elton Pope’s point of view doesn’t work and it just doesn't feel like Doctor Who. Presenting a Doctor Who story in the form of a video diary could have potentially worked (even though I have very little respect for the found-footage genre), but it at least needed something happening that was interesting. Instead, we had Elton, and later another group of characters searching for the Doctor, while absolutely nothing happened to move the story forward. It looks like something's going to start happening when Victor Kennedy shows up, but then it ends up falling flat. It isn't until the last ten minutes that the story gets anywhere, and where it goes … I'll get to that later.

 

There is probably just one redeeming feature I can find in this episode, and that’s the fact that we actually get to see some flashbacks to events from previous episodes such as Rose or Aliens Of London. These moments are a mix of newly-recorded scenes and stock footage. While I did like this, you know you’ve got a problem with your episode when the best parts are flashbacks to previous episodes! Once we're past these scenes, we get to know Elton's group LINDA. LINDA are one of the most annoying aspects of this episode. While each group member has a personality and are decently characterized, they serve no purpose, and just grind the already-pathetic pace to a halt when they start playing music and turning into musical LINDA. Characters such as Bliss who while likeable, appear so fleetingly that they were better off not appearing at all. Eventually, they are stopped from their music playing and get on to researching the Doctor by Victor Kennedy. Victor Kennedy is a character that basically sums up the episode. Now I really like Peter Kay, and I was glad to hear that he was appearing in Doctor Who, and you can see he's trying to play his character seriously, but it just doesn’t work. His lines and his behaviour are sometimes supposed to be intimidating, but it just ends up making me laugh.

 

As Elton tries to track down Rose, we have a reappearance from Jackie. While it should be nice to see a return to Jackie and learn a bit more about how she is coping while her daughter is travelling with the Doctor, this episode has already made me so cynical, and subjected me to so many scenes of Jackie flirting with Elton, that I couldn't care less. The friendship between the two climaxes with Jackie discovering a photo of Rose in Elton’s pocket, and she confronts him about it. While this should move the practically static plot along, I'm already falling asleep by this point.

 

Following a confrontation between Victor and Elton, Victor reveals himself to be ... an Abzorbaloff. Put simply, the Abzorbaloff is a villain that deserves to be in the Doctor Who Adventures’ kids comic strips. Whilst the concept of an alien absorbing and consuming people by touch isn't anything I mind in Doctor Who, especially considering that the Abzorbaloff was created by a nine-year old who had won a Blue Peter competition, it doesn’t deserve it’s own episode, even one as terrible as this. The five minutes of screen time that the Hoix had at the beginning of the episode was more engaging than this! I have to praise Peter Kay as the Abzorbaloff though, not because of the villain he portrays, but because of how much I laughed at it. The chase scene between the Abzorbaloff and Elton wasn’t tense or scary, but I was just having fits of laughter over it, all the way through. Just as things are reaching their worst point, the Doctor and Rose show up in the TARDIS. Thank God! But wait … the second Rose steps out of the TARDIS, she just shouts about Elton upsetting Jackie … completely ignoring the Abzorbaloff. What's wrong with this episode?! Once we get even more failed drama out of the way, it's time to deal with the Abzorbaloff. Now I can say, that for an episode that’s so shockingly bad by this point, the resolution was … alright. Being defeated by Earth's gravity, is something I'm just indifferent to.

 

Once the embarrassingly bad Abzorbaloff gone, the Doctor tells Elton what happened to his mother when he was a child. Now this is annoying, not because it's bad, but because this is what the episode should've been about. The Doctor explains that his mother was killed by a living shadow in the darkness. THIS is what the episode should’ve been about, a mother being killed by a shadow in the darkness, and what it meant for Elton as a child. But look at what we got instead! Instead we got a story that felt as clunky as Elton's editing skills, and a comical, pathetic villain. I'm not even sure that Love & Monsters knows what tone it wants to go for. With the Abzorbaloff and the comical opening with the Hoix, you’d think this episode was aimed at a younger audience, especially after last week's incredibly dark episode, The Satan Pit. However, Jackie heavily seducing Elton, and Elton implying that he has sex with a paving slab with a face on it, suggest this episode's targeted at a more adult audience. What does this episode want to be!?

 

This review might be more garbled than usual, but I’ve run out of patience and ranting energy to carry on. So, in conclusion, this episode is a blatant waste of forty-five minutes. The story being told from Elton’s point of view ends up being incredibly grating, Peter Kay was good but for all the wrong reasons, Jackie’s return is spoilt, and even the Doctor and Rose’s presence can't salvage this wreck. All in all, the person I feel the sorriest for in all this, is the poor kid that designed a monster in a Blue Peter competition, that was intended to be the size of a bus and taken seriously, and it got written into a parody of an episode like this. The one significant redeeming feature here, was how much I laughed at it, but I don't feel like I was supposed to laugh. Try and avoid this episode as much as you can, because at the time of writing this review and after watching over two-hundred Doctor Who stories over ten years, it is honestly the worst episode of the show that I have ever seen.

 

 

Love & Monsters



2/10