Time Heist

So that’s all the excitement of the Independence Referendum over. I actually felt rather dejected on Friday morning – not so much from the result but by the fact that it all seemed like something of an anti-climax. With the population being asked to decide something very important for a change it looked like it was back to business as usual with the politicians bickering amongst themselves about what exactly it is that they will be delivering. However, the engagement of ordinary people into the political arena has been fantastic and if the momentum of this can be maintained there is a chance for real change in local communities.

One of the more peculiar claims made during the independence debates was that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be able show Doctor Who. I think this actually comes under the “laughably clutching at straws” school of political debating but I’m actually rather glad that the BBC will be left intact. It’s not without its faults and some of the reporting during the referendum was askew (and on both sides as well) but I’ve seen what national broadcasting is like in other countries and the BBC is one of those institutions that we can be proud of as a nation. Aside from anything else, the Doctor is now a no-nonsense Glaswegian so he would probably tell the programme controllers to “Shut up! Shutity up up up!”

The week’s episode, Time Heist, has kept up the strong run that the series has been on lately. The difference this week is that the format was harking back to something that was more like a mid-1970s Who: taking another genre / story and shoehorning it into the Doctor Who format (e.g. Brain Of Morbius being an adaptation of Frankenstein). In fact this was the idea behind Doctor Who right from the start in 1963 but what Time Heist gave us was a Sci-Fi bank robbery caper with a certain nod to the work of Philip K Dick. Particularly, this reminded me of both Minority Report and Paycheck – where the central character has agreed to have his mind wiped by a client but his payment is a set items left to aid his survival. In Time Heist this is all told in a typical Doctor Who style with a simple middle-end-beginning type of storytelling.

One thing I would question in this week’s story is just how family friendly it was. I saw this with our oldest boy but the younger two were in bed by the time we watched this (I really don’t watch live TV outside of news and football these days). I’d say it was still pre-watershed material but the Teller monster was a really terrifying creation and the soup-brain man, with his head caved in, even made me feel rather queasy. I suppose it’s always a fine line between family entertainment and infantilism but I do think they slightly overdid it this week. In fact next week’s episode starts at 8:30 which will actually put it past the watershed when it finishes. Whether that is due to content or scheduling remains to be seen.