OK, another monster in the Thames. We've been there before. Several times. And this one has somehow been there... forever? How? Why? Who chained it the first time? Why hadn't it moved before it was chained? Why did people chain it rather than kill it hundreds(?) of years ago when it was first 'caught' when they wouldn't have had the means or forethought to check the magical poo of the thing to see if it would be good fuel. Why does it need to eat people? Wouldn't practically any mammal do, given we're all constructed basically the same? This can't simply be brushed off! The monster is your CORE PLOT DEVICE and it NEEDS a reason for being there in a historically highly populated area with intense ship traffic where there is no way in heck it wouldn't have been noticed by now given its sheer size. Even the WORST of the old series tried to give some sort of reason the monster of the week was where it was! And the villain is so one-dimensionally over the top and uninteresting and un-compelling and flat... ugh, I would have preferred a comic villain in the vein of Dr. Evil! And the Doctor in this one... since when does THE DOCTOR sympathize more with the monster that EATS PEOPLE! I don't even know who this character is anymore! If the monster had, I dunno, been sapient and starving and felt sad about eating people but it had no other food... maybe I could accept it... sort of? But as far as we are told, it's just an animal. A man-eating animal. Like ones The Doctor has blown up in many many episodes in the past 50 years. And last I checked, we still tended to kill every man-eating everything anyway. Are we supposed to now feel sorry for the giant python that ate the guy a couple weeks ago? The storytelling is simply preposterous now.
I don't blame Capaldi any more than I did poor Sylvester McCoy... the writers should be ashamed. They get PAID to write this series, and it's as though they're not even trying. I've seen BAD fanfics better than this drivel.
The only thing that will make this episode better is comparing it to the NEXT episode, which is a horror cliché so overdone that the Outer Limits already did it TWICE, and then there was the movie "Monster House". And Doctor Who has ALSO used familiar themes several times. Remember the people disappearing into the fake second-floor flat that was really a space-ship? For a series that can take its characters literally anywhere in the universe in any time... it seems really invested in going nowhere but where everyone has already tread a worn and tired path.
I don't blame Capaldi any more than I did poor Sylvester McCoy... the writers should be ashamed. They get PAID to write this series, and it's as though they're not even trying. I've seen BAD fanfics better than this drivel.
The only thing that will make this episode better is comparing it to the NEXT episode, which is a horror cliché so overdone that the Outer Limits already did it TWICE, and then there was the movie "Monster House". And Doctor Who has ALSO used familiar themes several times. Remember the people disappearing into the fake second-floor flat that was really a space-ship? For a series that can take its characters literally anywhere in the universe in any time... it seems really invested in going nowhere but where everyone has already tread a worn and tired path.