Doctor Who "Under the Lake" Review

Another damn two parter!? Actually looking at the rest of the schedule it looks like every story arc in this season is a two parter. Moffat, we get it, you're trying new things, but seriously what is the point? We get half as many stories and takes twice as long to find out what happens. This is Under the Lake, in this episode The Doctor and Clara travel to an underwater base where it turns out is being haunted by several ghosts, The Doctor, Clara and the surviving crew members must now find out what they want so they can stop them.

*Spoilers Ahead*

This is why I hate two parters, it's so hard to review a story when you're only getting half the story, but nevertheless i'll do best with what i can. The ghosts themselves are just kind of...okay, i don't really care that much for their design or their motives for what they do, so far it seems rather forced and confusing, i was hoping this would be a simple ghost story but now the ghosts are talking in riddles and there's a symbol with co-ordinates and it's oh so big and important. Would it have been so hard to just make a story about ghosts on an underwater base? That's all I need. Now that's not to say the story is confusing to the point where you can't tell what the hell is going on, but even so, it could be made simpler and this is unnecessarily complicated.

The best part of the episode in my opinion is the crew on the base. I can't remember the last time i actually have a shit about the supporting characters in a Doctor Who episode, it's not happened for a fair few years. In this episode i do remember the whole crew and i remember their personalities, i remember one of them being a bit of a fangirl for the Doctor but she still focused on the safety of the crew, i remember the guy with glasses being a bit of a coward, i remember the translator, i remember the deaf woman being in charge, how interesting is that, there's a deaf character in charge and...that's all there is. It doesn't play a big role in the story (yet as far as we know) it wasn't caused by some alien attack, she doesn't have a sixth sense to replace it, she's just an ordinary deaf woman, that's a rather fascinating choice. Though while i may remember all of their personalities, i didn't say i was good at remembering their names.

Apart from that I honestly can't think of that much to talk about, like i said, it's hard to analyse a story when it's only halfway complete and The Doctor and Clara...are The Doctor and Clara, not much has changed with them. Actually there was a weird conversation between the two about Clara going native and getting too involved in the adventures...or something, i don't know it was a strange conversation and i don't entirely get what The Doctor was saying anyway. Does he not want to travel with her? Is he worried about her? Is she getting too addicted to travelling or is she settling down too much? It doesn't make much sense to me.

In the end I think this was a good episode but not as good as the last one, some of the plot elements are forcfully convoluted and it's too early for another two parter, the cast was good and it had some good lines in it but i've seen better. 7/10.

-Danny