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This show is getting better and better. Today's episode crammed so much expertly-balanced, brilliantly-handled material into a short space: classic BBC period drama, convincing science fiction of ideas as well as effects, fucking frightening horror, clever intersection with literary biography, perfect dovetailing into Victorian melodrama.
The use of real historical celebs in fiction can be very clever-clever and knowing (eg. Shakespeare in Love, with every other character coining a famous phrase) but the idea that witnessing other worlds revived Dickens' passion for humanity just before his death was ironic yet touching, convincing and life-affirming, even though it was born out of his encounter with SF horror. The way the Victorian characters engaged with the Gelf as angels or demons, fitting aliens into their ready-made Christian framework, was also perfect and "right", intelligent rather than just smart-arse.
There were a ton of interesting ideas, but it was all carried by character -- the script giving space for conversations, and the performances making you care almost immediately about people you'd just met, as well as about the Doctor and Rose with their clearly deepening relationship. Fascinating moral questions emerging from arguments during action scenes, with the pace never slipping.
As noted at the start, one of the really unexpected aspects of this episode for me was that it would have scared the living shade out of me if I'd been watching it alone in the dark.
I genuinely sense we are getting classic TV in the making here, something people will look back on nostalgically in decades to come. I feel it's at least as good right now as X-Files at its best, and I also suspect it's better than Doctor Who ever was before. |
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