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 | Matt Fitton being formulaic |
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| By: | Jared Star, Portsmouth, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 27 October 2021 |
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| Rating: |   5 |
This is a Matt Fitton script playing into his strengths as a writer: just making something functional.
Matt Fitton isn't a writer I get too fussed about. He can make an hour-long story of whatever you ask him to, but he doesn't do much outside the box. He's mostly used to balance out the continually experimental John Dorney in the 8th Doctor box sets. With that in mind, this script definitely needed a different writer. It’s not bad per-say, I quite liked the idea of the setting, and involving Dalek supreme was also a great idea.
Although, you can't absorb yourself into the setting of this one all that well. Sure it's a complicated place to begin with, but the Doctors kept bombarding us with technical jargon to explain the cathedral. The first ten minutes practically was just either one of them telling us the cathedral is multi-dimensional. They repeated the same stuff over and over, just with different wording. Not only that, but the Dalek invasion didn't allow for much exploration to be done at all with this cool environment. The entire story takes place in four rooms.
The banter between Baker and Tennent was cool when it got going, though it certainly took its time to do so. Tennent masquerading as a lost tourist was funny in the beginning, but when the action started, he was still deceiving his younger self for no reason. At one point Tennent even says that Baker has figured him out, but then continues to try and deceive him for another 10 minutes before finally revealing who he is. It was also weird how Tennent practically played the companion role and seemed like he didn't know the Doctor at all. Tennent asks the Doctor more questions than the actual companion of the episode. That aspect made it feel like both Doctors were not equals.
There was still some great stuff though. The actual plot was tight and well-crafted, and the nods to both Nu and Classic Who were great. Particularly, the reference to "The End of the World" (one of my favorite eps from Eccleston's season). That bit was my favorite. The climax and resolution were both fantastic, practically faultless in my books.
All in all, this isn't a bad episode by any stretch of the imagination, but I wished for something a bit less formulaic from an episode with both an astounding setting and the most iconic Doctor Who team-up. I'm looking forward to the other "Out of Time" releases!
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 6 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Getting the generally regarded favorite Doctor of Old Who and the generally regarded favorite Doctor of New Who together to go after the Daleks? What could possibly go wrong? I think that Matt Fitton never really got farther than that. So, we get a typical Daleks seize the base story, with two Doctors trying to outwit them. There is some interesting interaction between our Doctors, with the technically younger Doctor giving the "voice of wisdom" advice to the older Doctor - don't travel alone. The two Doctors are great as usual. It is just that I would have liked them to be in a more original kind of story.
